Your ShelfYour Projects

THE WRATH OF GOD

33%

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 13, 1888

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 14, No. 2.

Read the full edition

THE WRATH OF GOD.

By Arthur T. Pierson

JESUS taught us that wrath in God is the unchangeable perfection of holiness; and that holiness is love to the holy and wrath to the guilty. The same fire that warms and cheers, that refines and purifies, also burns and blasts, tortures and consumes; it all depends on our relation to the fire, whether it be our friend or our foe. We ourselves, by our sin, create the repulsion, with which we often find fault in God.
In Retsch's illustrations of Goethe's Faust, there is one plate where angels are seen dropping roses down upon the demons who are contending for the soul of Faust. But every rose falls like molten metal, burning and blistering wherever it touches. God rains roses down, but our sinful hearts, meeting divine love with hate, and grace with stubborn, willful disobedience, turn love into wrath; and what dropped from his hand a flower, beautiful and fragrant, becomes, when it touches the ungrateful and unloving soul, a live coal.—Arthur T. Pierson.