XXV. The Wrath of God
Such is the order of the universe; and the universe is the embodiment and expression of the will of God. The progress of man towards God, i.e. salvation, according to the will and intention of God, is the consummation of the Divine love. Conversely, the retrogression of man away from God, his growing unlikeness to God and his increasing inability to comprehend the will and nature of God, is the consummation of the Divine wrath. Hence “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hinder the truth in unrighteousness”; and this wrath is manifested against them, because they go wrong in spite of the knowledge of God which by nature they possess. (Romans 1:18) This “wrath of God” can be defined more clearly when we compare the expression “day of wrath”; and it is rightly treated by Professor H. A. A. Kennedy (St. Paul on the Last Things, p. 313: “the terms which he employs to denote the fate of the unbelieving areὄλεθρος,θάνατος,φθορά,ἀπώλεια,ἀπόλλυσθαι,ὀργή”.) as an equivalent expression (though used from a different point of view) to the other terms, “destruction,” “perdition,” etc., which express the lot of the sinful. The inference from it is clear, that there is only one power in the universe, that all proceeds from God, that sin is permitted in the purpose of God and is a fact and condition of His created universe. “The creation” (i.e. the universe as created) “was subjected to vanity” (i.e. to failure in attaining the ultimate purpose intended by God), “not of its own will” (i.e. not because it deliberately and intentionally aims at and desires to fail), “but by reason of Him who subjected it” (i.e. because this is a stage in the evolution of the purpose of God), “in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God.” I should venture to gather from this that in Paul’s conception the failure is temporary and the vanity is evanescent, “the evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound,” — but that this is so only when we take a wider view of the universal purpose of the Creator. There shall be a new heaven and a new earth; (2 Peter 3:13;Revelation 21:1.) but these come only after a great lapse of time in the movement of the ages. In the life of individuals the purpose of God has not the width of scene necessary for perfecting itself That purpose works on a greater scale and through a wider sweep of time. The individual man, therefore, does not in Paul’s view fill up a complete cycle of time; but is only a unit in a greater whole, or, so to say, a link in a long chain; and the Divine will works itself out through a cycle vastly longer than the life of the individual. Paul never wholly separated himself from the old Hebrew point of view, that the Promise of God is given to the race not to the individual, that the Divine purpose works itself out in the nation, and that the individual cannot be regarded as a complete and independent part of the scheme of the universe, but is merely a unit and part of the race. May we not see in this a hint respecting the direction in which Paul would have proceeded, if he had been called upon to explain the fate of the sinful individual and to reconcile this with the good purpose of God and the necessary triumph of that purpose? (See above, Section XXI.) I do not presume to put words into the mouth of Paul, or to suggest groundless hypotheses as to the way in which he would have explained what in his letters he has not found occasion to explain: I would avoid even the risk of seeming to do this. Yet there is sufficient reason to assert that he had not wholly cut himself off from the Hebrew view (a view characteristically Oriental), that the individual must be judged in his family and his tribe and above all in his nation. We are in modern time, perhaps, too apt in the West to think only of the individual and his single life and his single fate, and to interpret Paul as if he were wholly of our mind in this way of looking solely at the single being as a complete entity and never regarding him as a mere unit in the nation, whose destiny ultimately controls and overrides his fate.
