On freedom and the wrath of God

I was just reading a transcript of an interview from 2008 on Ancient Faith Radio in which Frederica Mathewes-Green was interviewing Fr. Ted Stylianopoulos. At one point Father Ted says:

But you notice, in Romans chapter 1, as God Holiness encounters the plight and sin of humanity, He doesn’t do something additional to punish them. The word there is, He gave them up, which the scripture says, as in the Prodigal Son, means, he let them be free.

Sometimes one reads one of those phrases that simply opens up various passages of Scripture for one and makes one reflect. This was one of those phrases. In America we value our freedom. We are known as the country of individual rights and freedoms. But, Father Ted brought a different insight to this idea of personal freedom.

Father Ted’s discussion was about the wrath of God. He pointed out that we often assume that God’s wrath will issue in some type of active punishment. But, as he said, in fact several of the arguments in Romans 1 was that God’s wrath did not result in active punishment, but rather in giving the people the very freedom to carry out their wishes that they so desired. St. Paul’s letter to the Romans says:

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness . . . Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts . . . God gave them over to shameful lusts . . . he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done

This passage shows God doing the same thing with humanity that he did with the Prodigal Son. What did God do with the Prodigal Son? He gave him his inheritance and set him free to do what he wanted to do. What does God do with a sinful humanity in Romans? Well, he confirms in us the gifts of reasoning, intelligence, etc., that he gave us and sets us free. So, how is God’s wrath being revealed? In both the Prodigal Son and in Romans, God’s wrath is revealed in his allowing us to reap the consequences of our actions without any merciful interference on his part.

The Prodigal Son ends up destroying himself. At the end of it he cannot blame his father because he did it all to himself. In the same way, St. Paul says that God allowed sinners to experience the consequences of their sin. When it says that he turned them over, it is because the addicting power of sin is so strong that there is no true freedom, no true independence, as the Prodigal Son found out. The only true freedom is the freedom of sinlessness. Thus the sinner who turns to God cannot accuse God of being unjust or unfair. God has simply given us what we most desired, to “do our own thing.”

[Note: from where does this idea that sin is addicting come? In part from Saint Augustine of Hippo in his book The City of God. “For even the vice which by the force of habit and long continuance has become a second nature, had its origin in the will.” Sin may begin as a decision, but it becomes a vice with “the force of habit,” the definition of an addiction. Our Lord Jesus Christ called it slavery to sin.]

This means that we need to be careful about how we preach about the wrath of God. Most of us preach about the wrath of God only as the active entrance of God into a situation in order to execute punishment. And, that does indeed happen, though not with every tornado or hurricane that strikes the USA. But, in Romans and in the Prodigal Son, the wrath of God is actually, and most often, God’s permission for us to do as we wish and to experience fully the consequences of our decisions. At the end, we can hardly blame God for what has gone wrong, but should only reply as did the Prodigal Son, “I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.'”

We also need to be careful about how we preach about our freedom in Christ. It is freedom from addiction, not freedom to do our own thing. It is a freedom from addiction that, with the presence of the Holy Spirit, allows us to turn in obedience to our heavenly Father. [Yes, I realize that even after we are set free we continue to sin. But, sometimes the Church is to us as Alcoholics Anonymous is to their members, a place where we can work through our addictions and keep receiving forgiveness and support and the food of immortality. We may be an “alcoholic”, a sinner, for our current life, but we need not wallow in our sin.]

So, let’s not skip talking about the wrath of God. It is certainly present. But, let’s point out how often the wrath of God is simply God letting us alone to do our own thing. And, let’s be careful about how we talk about our freedom in Christ, lest we inadvertently give permission for someone to fall back into their addiction.