gather us in
if i were God, i'd be angry too
I’ve always been deeply uncomfortable with all the parts in the Bible where God destroys things or seems to commission His people to kill and destroy.
I’ve never understood why people make kids toys and nursery decorations that are Noah’s Ark themed, for example. I mean, it’s a story about God drowning His entire creation because He regretted making it.
Not cute.
I remember reading Hosea in college.
Redeeming Love, a romance novel inspired by the story of Hosea and Gomer, was all the rage with evangelical college girls of my day, and so my small group got the great idea that we’d venture into the prophets with Hosea.
And you gotta love our earnest audacity. No teacher, no Beth Moore study, no commentaries. Just us and the knowledge we’d attained from our partially completed Vanderbilt undergrad degrees and the text.
(I’d add Holy Spirit, but I’m not sure how much we knew to turn to the Spirit in our reading in those days. It was largely an intellectual endeavor.)
And I just remember how we were all underwhelmed. And disturbed.
I suppose, thanks to Francine Rivers, we foolishly expected the story of God instructing a prophet to marry an adulterous woman to be romantic somehow?
But instead, we faced the discomfort of reading about God’s wrath.
It’s a discomfort I’ve wrestled with faithfully1 for years now. In recent years, I’ve read through the whole Bible several times, circled back through the prophets.
Trained by Precept Bible studies to color code, I have more than one Bible where I’ve marked all passages of God’s admonition, warning, or wrath in orange.
And, thus, I’ve spilled a lot of orange ink.
Even as I’ve tried to face it and reckon with it, I’ve never loved how much God expresses anger in the Bible.
But damn, if I’m not starting to get it.
Because I’m angry too. Really angry.
As a Southern Christian female (and an enneagram 9 to boot), I’m conditioned to fear my anger, feel guilty, preemptively apologize, repent as if this feeling scorching my chest is a sin.2 No one likes a mad woman, after all.
But I’m mad.
Enraged.
And not just because the algorithm is programmed to make me that way.
I’m seething because there’s so damn much to be mad about.
And here’s what I keep thinking as I read selections of the prophets in my church’s reading plan this year—
I’m glad God’s pissed about how the people He made treat other people He made because He should be. I’m pissed off too.
God’s anger at His people acting corruptly and oppressing the poor used to make me squirm. Now it kinda makes me go, “Hell, yeah!”
You’re right, God.
Hosea had it right. We have forsaken You “to cherish whoredom.”
We are like stubborn heifers.
We are a people without understanding, and we are certainly coming to ruin.
A spirit of whoredom is within us, and we do not know You.
We have spurned the good.
We have sown the wind. We are reaping the whirlwind.
We’re building up altars that aren’t to You.
Our hearts are false. We are full of lies.
Burn us up, God.
Burn us the hell up.
Send the flood.
Wipe us out.
And, please, in Your mercy, let me be one of the remnant on the boat.
I know I don’t know what I’m asking.
But the ache is so great. “How long until the reckoning, Lord?”
When will the wicked be held to account?
When will You bind what is broken?
When will You make us new?
Alongside all that orange ink, my Bibles are also blazed with purple. Highlights of grace and restoration and redemption. Arcs for God’s faithful covenant-keeping. Hearts around every passage where God says we will be His people and He will be our God and we will know Him and walk in His ways without having to be taught.
I read the passages I’ve marked purple and long for a place, a time when we have hearts of flesh instead of hearts of stone. When we have eyes that can see and ears that can hear. When the Lord is our light and there’s no need to sing, “Keep me where the light is” because we’re surrounded by it, completely abiding in its warmth and glow.
But since we’re still here on what feels like a godforsaken planet in what feels like a godless and godforsaken country, I have to trust this isn’t the end.
Even though we’ve forsaken God in a million ways, I have to trust that He actually hasn’t given up on us yet.
Since He’s not giving in to the rage, I guess I shouldn’t either.
That’s the other thing I notice about all of God’s rage-y moments in Scripture:
Love for us is the motivator of His anger, and most of the time, His love wins out.
The passages of God’s wrath often come in tandem with breathtaking descriptions of His desire for our repentance and our return. They are filled with pictures of God grieving in His compassion for His creation, yearning like a mom to gather us under His wings.
The orange gives way to purple on the very same page.
And I don’t want to accuse God of being too permissive of a parent or anything, but sometimes I feel like He does a lot of counting to three and then just forgiving us anyway. And while that makes me really mad because there are a lot of wicked people whose teeth I wish He’d break3 , I also feel grateful that He is a God of mercy and of love and I want to be shaped by that, made in that image.
And so I bring my rage at the brokenness and wickedness of the world. I bring my contrition for the ways I participate in them, the ways I am complicit.
I bring my desire for goodness and truth and my hope that when God says He will make all things new, He means it.
And I imagine a heavenly existence where the animating force of every person is pure love. Where there is no dark, only light.
I imagine it with such fervor that all I want is to live the prayer, “on earth as it is in heaven.”
Though Scripture seems to love the metaphor that burning is required to remove the chaff, maybe my prayer is not actually “burn it all down.”
Maybe my prayer is “gather us in.”
Lord, make me wheat. Gather me in.
Gather us in, the rich and the haughty
Gather us in, the proud and the strong
Give us a heart so meek and so lowly
Give us the courage to enter the song
Here we will take the wine and the water
Here we will take the bread of new birth
Here you shall call your sons and your daughters
Call us anew to be salt for the earth
Give us to drink the wine of compassion
Give us to eat the bread that is you
Nourish us well and teach us to fashion
Lives that are holy and hearts that are true
Not in the dark of buildings confining
Not in some heaven light years away
But here in this place the new light is shining
Now is the kingdom, now is the day
Gather us in and hold us forever
Gather us in and make us your own
Gather us in, all peoples together
Fire of love in our flesh and our bones
Fire of love in our flesh and our bones
—”Gather Us In” Marty Haugen
Yes, I’m gonna apply that word to myself.
Far from it. I’m starting to recognize it as Holy Spirit flames.
Psalm 3:7 The imprecatory psalms also make a lot more sense to me than they used to.