His "wrath against sin" is a way of "putting it." If you
can best express the suffering which springs from wrong methods as
"God's wrath" you are at liberty so to express yourself; but we should
not lose sight of the fact that the wrong methods produce the suffering,
and not an outburst of fury on the part of One who is put before us
as Love.
The fact that the Hebrew writers often used a vivid form of warning and
invective is not a reason why we should keep on doing it. The Hebrew
writer was a primitive speaking to primitives. Meaning what we mean, he
required a stronger, fiercer vocabulary than we ever need. In saying
this I am not dodging the issue; I am stating a fact which rules in all
historical interpretation. To make the phraseology of two thousand years
before Christ the literal expression of the thought of two thousand
years after Him is to be archaic beyond reason. Having grasped a
principle, we phrase it in the language of our time.
The language of our time makes, on the whole, for restraint, sobriety,
and exactitude of statement. Few of our habits modify themselves more
constantly and more rapidly than our forms of speech. Not only does each
generation find something special to itself, but each year and each
season. To me it seems that much of our misunderstanding of God springs
from the effort to fix on Him forevermore the peculiarities we infer
from the idiom of five thousand years ago.
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