God Is Angry

Our Heavenly Father, Sovereign and Most Holy God, we, Your people, have not been obedient to You. We have taken the freedom of liberation, the grace of salvation and gone our disobedient ways. We come before You, seeking the grace of repentance. Please, may Your Holy Spirit teach us and lead us into true and honest repentance and returning. Amen!

And the LORD said to me, I have seen this people, and they are a stiff-necked people indeed! Deuteronomy 9: 13

Our Father God, is angry. His anger is not against the sinful world. He’s not angry with those who do not believe that He is Sovereign; not angry with those who do not believe in Jesus; not angry with those who prefer darkness to the light He has given to the world. He is not angry with the pagans. No! Not today! God’s full wrath is towards us, His children, whom He has saved from the bondage of sin and are reborn in Him. He has seen us and is seeing us as we continue to use our freedom to turn further and further away from Him.

See this scene. God and Moses are on the Holy Mountain, where God is laying before His servant the plans He has made for His liberated people. These plans are to ensure that they live lives that will be a testimony to His goodness and faithfulness. In obedience to their God, just by their own obedience and love, and just by their ordinary daily living, in His freedom, unbelievers around will see and come to know God as the One True God. But is this happening? God breaks up the time with His servant, cuts it short, if you ask me, and speedily tells Moses to go back down to the people, with haste. Go down from here at once, because your people whom you brought out of Egypt have become corrupt. They have turned away quickly from what I commanded them and have made a cast idol for themselves. Deuteronomy 9: 12

O yes indeed! Our God is angry, so angry that His wrath is tipping, getting ready to be fully poured out upon us, His saved children - not the world. This is what He says to Moses. Let me alone, so that I may destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven. And I will make you into a nation stronger and more numerous than they. Deuteronomy 9: 14.

God is describing His people as they are at present. This is no description of how they used to be, or how they will be in the future. God is speaking about the present behaviour of His children, what He is seeing of them now, their current actions. Listen! This is not what others have told Him. This is not what He surmises, based on what He is hearing from them. This is first-hand witnessing, for He says quite openly to Moses, I have seen.

Do not be deceived to think that all of this is not for you, not for us, not for believers, because we have been saved and are in the hands of grace. Be wise! Be sensible! Be hearing and heeding! Many branches, natural branches at that, were taken from the vine by the Gardener, where they were anchored. They were taken off, because of unbelief. God, the Righteous Husbandman, would not tolerate those belonging to the Vine, who were living in continued disobedience to Him. You see, they were freely living in the Vine, but giving all their attention to what was not of the Vine. They were known by their lack of True Vine Fruit.