Tag Archives: god

Is God easily angered?

No.

God claims to be compassionate, forgiving, and slow to anger. And that’s what other people always say about him in the Bible, too. David repeatedly said God was compassionate and slow to anger. The prophets Joel and Jonah said the same thing, and that he relents from sending calamity. Nahum, too, said God was slow to anger, and Jeremiah described him as long-suffering. And the New Testament says that God is love, and that love is not easily angered.

Here are all the stories in the Bible where God demonstrates how slow he is to anger:

  • God wasn’t too hard on Sarah for laughing at his message. (Though he must have done something to make her so afraid to admit she’d done it.)
  • God didn’t get angry when Abraham repeatedly challenged God’s plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. He didn’t seem to mind him asking what God would do if there were increasingly small numbers of good people there. (Though Abraham wasn’t confident enough to go all the way down to one good person. And he seemed awfully timid about the whole thing.)
  • God cooperated with Gideon when he repeatedly tested God by asking for signs that it was really him. (Though Gideon sure seemed to expect God to be angry.)
  • When Job spent most of his story talking about how cruel and unjust God was, God waited a long time before reacting at all. And then he didn’t do anything worse in response than making fun of Job. (Because he had done way more than enough to him already. And God was still intimidating enough that Job ended up declaring himself to be in the wrong, for no logical reason at all.)

That’s about it. If God is really so slow to anger, how can there be so few accounts of him acting that way? And why do the people even in those stories expect him not to be so? Because most of the time, God is not actually slow to anger at all.

Yes.

Some people said “Does the Lord become impatient?”, apparently implying that they think that’s not the kind of thing he would do. But the prophet Micah didn’t seem to think people should say that, because God does become impatient, very easily.

In the Bible, God is always getting ridiculously angry over the most insignificant things, and killing people before they have a chance to do anything good to redeem themselves. (And often before they even have a chance to actually do anything bad to deserve it.)

Getting angry is not a rare thing for God. He displays his stormy wrath every day. It terrifies and consumes people. He is a jealous and avenging God, who is filled with wrath and vents it against his enemies. His surges of anger may not always last very long, but he gets so angry that the mountains shake and the whole earth trembles. No one can stand before him and endure his wrath.

God pursues people with anger and slays them without pity. His anger reduces people to nothing. It drives him to kill and kill and kill, and then he’s still just as angry. Sometimes the Bible says God will stay angry at his people forever. Even when he sets aside all his wrath, he’s still angry!1

(Keep in mind that God is being “patient” and “merciful” and restraining his anger throughout all of this. So he’s really even angrier than he seems. If he let his true anger show, he would have just killed everybody a long time ago. And the only reason he holds back his wrath at all is that he figures he can get more people to praise him that way, not because he cares about anyone other than himself.)

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The Story of David and Abigail
David Expects to be Treated Like a King Prematurely

David sent messengers to a rich man named Nabal, asking him to give David and his men something, anything he could find. David thought Nabal owed him something in exchange for not harming Nabal’s employees. But Nabal chose not to give David anything, since he didn’t even know who David was. So David took 400 men with him and went to attack Nabal and murder all the men who worked for him.

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David Expects to be Treated Like a King Prematurely
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The Story of the Hunt for David
David Joins Israel's Enemies

David went to the Philistine city of Gath to escape from Saul. But the people there thought they recognized him as a notorious Philistine slaughterer. So David pretended he was insane,1 and then he ran away and hid in a cave.

Then he went into a city and fought the Philistines who were attacking it. But God told him that Saul was coming, and that the people of the city would hand him over to Saul to keep him from destroying their city. So David left the city, and what God predicted didn’t happen.

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David Joins Israel's Enemies
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Would God reject the temple?

No.

When Solomon made God a temple, God said he had put his name there forever. He said his eyes and heart would always be there. Even before the temple was built, God had already decided that he would live in Jerusalem forever, and wouldn’t need a mobile tabernacle anymore.

Yes.

But God also told Solomon he would reject that temple if any of Solomon’s descendants ever failed to obey God. So there was pretty much no chance that he was actually going to be loyal to his temple forever. The only way that could happen would be if every single person who was descended from Solomon always obeyed God perfectly, forever.

By the time of Josiah, God had indeed decided to reject the temple where he had promised to stay forever. And after that, God told Ezekiel that the things his people were doing were going to drive him far from his sanctuary.

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The Story of David and Jonathan
The Gay Story

Saul hates David, Saul’s children love David

After David killed Goliath, women from all over Israel started singing and dancing and claiming that David had slain tens of thousands, but Saul had only slain thousands. This made Saul jealous and angry at David, and they became enemies.

The next day, Saul tried to kill David twice by throwing a spear at him, but he missed both times. Since Saul wasn’t able to kill David himself, he decided to let his other enemies do it for him. So Saul offered to let David marry his daughter Merab if David fought some more Philistines. But David didn’t think he was worthy of becoming the king’s son-in-law, because he wasn’t rich and famous enough.

(Even though women all over Israel were singing his praises. Even though he had been chosen by God to become king of Israel. Even though Saul had promised to give great wealth and his daughter to whoever killed Goliath.)

So Merab married somebody else. But Saul found out that his other daughter, Michal, was in love with David, so Saul offered to let David marry her if he killed 100 Philistines. So David forgot about his supposed unworthiness, and killed 200 Philistines and brought their foreskins to Saul,1 and then David married Michal. Then Saul found out that Michal was in love with David. Again.

But David loved Saul’s son Jonathan more than he loved women. Jonathan loved David too, so he took off his clothes and became one with him. Jonathan informed David (who had already had to dodge Saul’s spear twice) that Saul was trying to get David killed. Jonathan knew this because Saul had told Jonathan to kill David. Then Jonathan told Saul that there was no reason to kill David for no reason, so Saul promised to stop trying to kill David.

Idol threats

But then God sent an evil spirit that made Saul throw a spear at David again, so David ran away from Saul’s house and stayed at his own house. Saul sent men to wait outside David’s house that night and kill him in the morning. When David realized that Saul’s men had come to kill him, he wrote a song about it.2 Then he threatened to kill his wife if she didn’t help him escape, so she lowered him through a window, and distracted Saul’s men with a decoy made from an idol that she had handy for some reason.

Saul went after David so he could capture him and kill him, but when he ran into Samuel and some other men, God made Saul strip off his clothes and lie down with the men and spend the night with them.

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The Gay Story
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Is anything hidden from God?

No.

God watches everything humans do, and there’s nowhere they can hide from him. Their sin and guilt aren’t hidden from him, either. Everything you do that you think is hidden, God will bring into judgment.

People are foolish to think they can hide what they’re doing from God, no matter how hard they try. You can’t get away from God. God is everywhere, so there’s no secret place you can go where he won’t see you. God has eyes everywhere, keeping watch on both the wicked and the good. No matter where you go, God will be there. If you think you’re hidden in the dark, God will still be able to see you like it’s light.

The elders of Israel thought God wouldn’t see what they were doing in the darkness, because God had abandoned the land. But God showed them to Ezekiel in a vision, so he clearly was aware of what they were doing. In fact, nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight.

Cain said his banishment would cause him to be hidden from God, but God said it was not so. Though I can’t really tell if he meant that part was not so, or just what Cain said after that…

Yes.

Sometimes God intentionally lets things be hidden from him. God commanded his people to bury their poop, to make sure he would never have to see it. God also told his people to put their idols out of his sight, which would be an impossible demand if nothing could be hidden from God.

Habakkuk says God’s eyes are too pure to look at evil, so that means all evil things are hidden from God! Isaiah says God hides himself from sinful people and doesn’t hear them.1 God also told Isaiah that “the past troubles” would be hidden from his eyes.

When God decided to stop inspiring prophecies but the prophets didn’t get the memo and continued prophesying anyway, God said he would cast them out of his presence and forget about them. When Jonah was swallowed by a fish, he said he had been banished from God’s sight.

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The Story of the Rejection of Saul
Not Evil Enough to Please God

King Saul attacked his enemies, the Philistines, but the Israelite army was outnumbered and had almost no weapons, so they ran and hid. Saul tried making a burnt offering so God would help him. But then Samuel told him that was a foolish thing to do, and now God had rejected Saul and would have to find a new king for his people.

Later, Samuel told King Saul that God wanted him to break God’s law and kill all the people and animals in the city of Amalek for the sins of their ancestors. So Saul ambushed the city and killed all the people except the king of the Amalekites,1 and all the animals except the best ones, which his men were planning to sacrifice to God later. Then God realized that he had made a bad decision when he made Saul king. Because Saul had failed to kill everyone and everything immediately,2 God rejected Saul as king of his people. Again.

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Not Evil Enough to Please God
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The Story of Jonathan and the Cursed Honey
Saul Tries to Starve His Own Army

During a war with the Philistines, King Saul’s son Jonathan ate some honey that he found on the ground. But then someone informed him that his father had said anyone who ate anything that day would be cursed. Jonathan thought that was dumb. By depriving them of food, Saul was making his army too weak to fight the Philistines. So Jonathan sneaked away and started killing Philistines himself. Then God made the Philistines panic and attack each other so the Israelites wouldn’t have to.

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Saul Tries to Starve His Own Army
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God punishes the wrong people

Way too often, the God of the Bible punishes people not for what they’ve done, but for what other people have done.

God accuses Nazirites of “sinning” just because they happened to be nearby when someone else died. Unless all Nazirites are like Samson, that probably wasn’t the Nazirite’s fault.

God told Aaron that if other people got too close to God’s stuff, God would kill Aaron along with them. Likewise, Moses said repeatedly that God got angry at him because of what the people did.

God’s law says if you find a person who has been killed, and you don’t know who did it, you can just blame it on a cow. Break the cow’s neck, and God’s bizarre sense of justice will be satisfied.

One time, God thought the Israelites deserved to die… but since he was biased in their favor, he decided to punish a bunch of other nations instead. God makes people drink from the cup of his wrath whether they deserve it or not.

God said because the king of Judah had broken a promise, the troops of Judah would be killed.

The book of Obadiah is all about what God’s planning to do to Edom. He says he’s going to turn everyone against that country and completely devastate them, and there will be no survivors. Why? It’s because of violence against Israel, but apparently the Edomites aren’t the ones who actually committed that violence. They just stood aloof while other nations invaded Israel. But God thought Edom was “like one of them”, and that was enough to make him want to kill all the Edomites.

Jesus (who the Bible says is God) found a man possessed by a legion of demons, which were tormenting the man. When Jesus confronted the demons, they expected to be tortured, or at least banished from the area. But Jesus didn’t end up punishing the demons at all. Instead, he let them do just what they wanted, which was to possess someone’s herd of 2000 pigs and make them drown themselves. So the innocent pigs died, and the innocent owner of the pigs lost his livestock. The demons, meanwhile, remained on the loose, let off the hook and free to continue causing trouble.

The Bible says God made an innocent man suffer and die for everyone else’s sins.

God had an angel kill Herod Agrippa because his subjects thought he was a god. Herod himself never said he was a god. God just killed him immediately after some other people said he sounded like a god. He didn’t even give Herod a chance to say what he thought about it.

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The Story of the Inauguration of Saul
Your Cattle or Your Eyes

When Samuel was getting old, his evil sons were next in line to take over the nation. The people of Israel suggested appointing a king to lead them instead. But Samuel didn’t think that was a good idea, so he asked God about it. God didn’t like the idea either, because he thought that meant his people wouldn’t consider him their king. But he told Samuel to do it anyway.

So Samuel warned Israel that their king would steal their property and enslave them. And he said God would never save them by putting an end to the king’s reign. The people said they wanted a king anyway, because all the other nations had kings. When God heard this, he said Samuel should go ahead and give them a king.

A tall, handsome young man named Saul came to Samuel to see if the prophet could tell him where his father’s lost donkeys were. Before he could ask him, Samuel told Saul that the donkeys had already been found while he was away looking for them.

Then Samuel took Saul home with him and kissed him and oiled him and told him God had made him the ruler of his people. Saul hid, but when the people of Israel found out that he was to be their king, they got God to find him for them. And they dragged him out and made him their king.

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Your Cattle or Your Eyes
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