Wrath in the Old Testament
This short blog comes out of a sermon preached at Immanuel Fellowship Church in Ellisville Missouri as part of our "Earthly Kings" series within 1 Samuel, exploring Israel's first king Saul and how his reign shows the unavoidable shortcomings of trusting in earthly solutions for our deepest longings and needs. You can listen to the whole sermon above. For more resources on faith and Christian living, visit our website or connect with our community. You can email us at hello@ifcstl.com or call/text us at 636-431-4708
If you’ve spent any time reading the Old Testament, you’ve probably hit a wall at some point. Maybe you grew up in church, but as you got older and began to pay attention, certain stories started to feel less like Sunday school lessons and more like moral dilemmas.
A lot of texts in scripture, especially in the Old Testament, seem to show God as angry and wrathful. Maybe even petty? How do we square that with what we know of the love of Jesus and the invitation of the gospel? How do we work out our own faith? If that resonates with you, I want to encourage you. This is something Christians have thought hard about from our earliest days. So let me invite you into a hard conversation.
Let's talk about 1 Samuel 15.
We looked at this text a few weeks ago at Immanuel fellowship. In this text, King Saul is given a direct command from God regarding the Amalekites: “Now go and attack the Amalekites and completely destroy everything they have. Do not spare them.” It’s a brutal sentence to read. In fact, this very chapter is one of the texts often utilized by skeptics to argue that the God of the Bible is cruel and unworthy of worship. If you read this and feel an internal shudder, your reaction isn’t a lack of faith. It’s normal. This text is heavy. It should make us stop in our tracks.
But if we are willing to lean into the discomfort for a moment, we might find that God’s character is far more consistent (and ultimately more beautiful) than it appears on the surface.
Confronting the Elephant: Did God Order a Genocide?
When we read a command to eradicate a people group, our modern minds immediately go to the darkest horrors of human history. We use terms like genocide or holy war. At first this may seem like semantics, but if we look closer, the biblical reality doesn’t actually fit those specific definitions and that’s actually important.
It wasn't a human atrocity: Legally and historically, genocide is a horror conceived and executed by human beings to one another for geopolitical power, racial hatred, or ethnic cleansing. What happens in 1 Samuel is fundamentally different because it originates entirely with God as an act of cosmic justice.
It wasn't a "Holy War": Historically, a holy war is fought because people believe that the act of violence itself is an act of worship that brings them closer to their deity. God never tells Israel that destroying the Amalekites will make them holier or earn His affection.
Theologians have long called biblical texts like this one “divine judgment warfare.” It isn’t an endorsement of human warefare violence; instead it is a localized, historical execution of God’s absolute justice against systemic evil.
The History We Forget
To understand the severity of the judgment, we have to understand the history of the Amalekites. They weren't innocent bystanders caught in a divine crossfire.
The Amalekites were a nomadic culture whose entire societal framework seems to have been built on pillaging and terror. When Israel was escaping slavery in Egypt - weary, exhausted, and completely vulnerable - the Amalekites didn't fight them face-to-face. They ambushed them from behind, preying explicitly on the seemingly weak Israelites.
Biblical descriptions of them don’t get better. For centuries, their culture remained defined by violence and oppression. God didn't act on a whim. He waited generations, offering space for repentance, until their systemic cruelty reached its tipping point.
Love and Wrath: Two Sides of the Same Coin
We live in a culture that romanticizes love into something soft and passive. But real love doesn't work that way. If something threatens horrific harm to the object of your love, and you feel no anger, no fierce desire to intervene and protect, then I would argue that you do not actually feel love.
Love and wrath are two sides of the same coin.
Because God passionately loves His creation, He must harbor a real wrath against the sin and evil that ravages it.
Think about the promise of heaven for a moment. Heave is a reality completely free from suffering, abuse, death, and tears. We long for that. But a universe free from evil requires the total destruction of evil. You cannot have a perfectly safe, loving eternity without a final, uncompromising judgment against sin.
The terrifying moments of judgment we see in the Old Testament—the Flood, Sodom, Jericho, and the Amalekites—are historical previews. They are sobering reminders that God takes human cruelty and sin seriously, and that a day is coming when every single act of injustice in human history will be accounted for.
The Danger of a "Human-Sized" God
When we say, "I could never follow a God who would do something I wouldn't do," we are making a dangerous assumption. In essence, we are saying, "I won't follow a God who isn't like me."
But if God is actually God, He cannot be encapsulated by our limited human frameworks. Can we have the humility to admit that the Creator of the universe might possess a grander context for cosmic justice than we do? If our concept of God never challenges us, never makes us uncomfortable, and perfectly aligns with our 21st-century Western sensibilities, then we aren't worshipping God. We are worshipping a mirror.
If your faith has been rattled by the weight of these difficult texts, please hear this: You don't have to pretend these passages are easy. But don't walk away from the table too soon. The same God who executed absolute justice in the Old Testament is the God who looked at the systemic bankruptcy of human sin and decided to solve it not by destroying us, but by absorbing the judgment Himself.
On the cross, the full weight of God's holy wrath against sin and His infinite love for broken people collided. The justice we see foreshadowed in 1 Samuel 15 was ultimately poured out on Jesus, so that anyone wrestling, doubting, and hurting could find absolute safety, redemption, and rest in Him.
Connect With Us
Immanuel Fellowship Church
We're a church in Ellisville Missouri that believes in the power of the gospel to transform lives. If you're in the area, we'd love to have you join us on Sunday mornings. Come as you are. Bring your questions. Bring your doubts. Bring your struggles. I can promise we’ll welcome you and we'll do our level best to point you to Jesus.
Questions? Want to talk? Email me at hello@ifcstl.com or call/text me at (636) 431 4708 I'd love to hear from you.
