A king’s wrath is like the growling of a lion, but his favor is like dew on the grass.
Ill-favor and good favor are two sides of the same coin. On one side, the king dislikes you; his wrath bears heavy. On the other side, the king likes you, and his pleasure soothes discomfort, creates more pleasure. Either way, he has an effect, and we should be at once interested in and wary of such effects. More, we should remember that this is a matter not merely receptive. We, the meek who inherit the earth (Ps. 37:11; Matt. 5:5), must consider how to cast our favor, that its wrath may be upon the wicked and its dew upon the righteous (Rom. 13:3-4).
A man with authority and with power has weight upon what happens. Men look to him; events bend to him. He who bears the mantle of kingship, of civil government, has a most visible portion of that power and authority (hence fallen man’s common deification of the state), and so his wrath and his blessing are apt emblems for the whole idea. The specifics here, however, do have something in them of the Scriptural view of government, which is consistently of an institution which ought to use force punitively, not regulatively, to punish, not to bless. Thus ‘wrath’ is the premonition of action, but favor leads to what is pleasant but not forceful, the blessing of dew on the grass.
More generally, however, we know we live in a world of people whose favor matters, in worldly terms. What other people think about us will affect us, emotionally and materially. How do we respond to the ‘king’ who sets his wrath against us, his favor for us?
Wrath may be turned upon us justly or unjustly, and the first course of action, when we have the time to think, is to figure out which is which. Wrath against sin is righteous, and if the wrath we face is discipline for our deeds (the province of family government, most crucially, and of the church) or punishment for our crimes (the ones God recognizes), we should react accordingly. We need not seek it out- Paul never sought the death penalty for himself- and we ought not to confuse it for atonement (Romish penance is an implicit rejection of Christ’s work (Is. 53:12; Heb. 6:4-5)). When God brings it to us, however, by the agency of authorities He set in place, we should bow to it and be not recalcitrant. Repentance is the first priority; once we have repented and reconciled (with Him and with His creation), we can look to recovery.
Wrath sent against us without justice is no less complicated. We can identify at least three important results of such wrath: God’s intervening to ward it off; God using it for our discipline; and the Job situation. In the first case, the wrath is of sin and God does not let it work upon us. At such we rejoice and triumph with all propriety (Ps. 43, 103-107,136,149). In the second case, God uses the wicked as He did Assyria, to be the means of judgment or of discipline. Not that the tool escapes the fruit of his wickedness (Is. 13). In the third case, when we cannot find a sin which is chastened, when we, like Job, cannot find a purpose of discipline, having looked for it with all care, we must submit to the purpose of God (Job 38-42), knowing that like Job we shall be lifted up at last, in this world often and certainly in the next.
For the man who does not know God, of course, all wrath has at least the question in it: ‘Will you repent and believe and live? Or will you die?’ Whether it comes with justice from the ‘king’s’ perspective or not, this question presses within it. All wrath has the purpose of judgement, here, except when joined to His effectual call.
Favor, similarly, can be given justly or unjustly. Here we must be wary, lest pleasantness become temptation, lest ease become sin. The problems are mirrors and iterations of the problems we face with wrath.
Above and before all of this, and pertinent to it, we should also consider our own criteria for wrath and for favor, according to His law. For this purpose, to find how to favor in righteousness, we can subsume ‘favor’ into the greater idea of ‘love,’ and ask instead what ‘love’ is- to which Christ and Moses and Paul provide an answer in unison: to love is to fulfil the law in whole-person relationship with others, heart warm towards the good and fiery towards the wicked (Rom. 13:8-10; Deut. 6:4-7; Matt. 22:36-40).
And of course, that gives us the template for righteous wrath as well (Ps. 97:10). He who loves God cannot love evil; indeed, if to love is to act aright, under His law, then ‘loving evil’ is definitionally impossible. The only course the lover of God can take is to hate evil and all its works, with fierce compassion for the sinner insofar as he is a man and utter pitilessness towards all of him which is sin and sinner. In that war, the first, the greatest, and the most desirable tool is the Gospel, seeking to bring men to repentance and life (Mark 1:15), but integral to that message and proceeding from His nature is the flip side: “Let the high praises of God be in their throats and two-edged swords in their hands, to execute vengeance on the nations…. to execute on them the judgment written! This is honor for all His godly ones” (Ps. 149:6-9).
God bless.
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
Colson Potter writes copious fiction and nonfiction, including a weekly Proverbs post and his blog at Creational Story.
