The Two Sides of the Character of God: Love and Wrath

People - those who are more ignorant of the Scriptures than they will admit - will often claim that there are contradictory images of God in the Bible, one of the loving God we see in Jesus, the other a wrathful God who, for example, told Israel to destroy the societies on Canaan. However, the problem isn't the God that we see in Scripture, but rather the view of God from which they make their judgment.

What these people, whether professing Christians or honest unbelievers, fail to acknowledge is that they are judging God, as He is presented in the Bible, from a humanistic worldview, that is, from an assumption that people are inherently good and deserving of hugs, self-esteem, flowers, and all the other syrupy slogans that have become so common in our society. However, that isn't the view of the Bible.

The worldview of the Bible includes the understanding that humans, from the moment of conception (Ps. 51:5), are wicked (Rom. 3:10-18), sinful (Is. 64:6, Jer. 17:9), and separated from God (Is. 59:2, Hab. 1:13). The Bible says that all men are "dead in trespasses and sins, by nature children of wrath" (Eph. 2:1-3). This is not a syrupy view!

Thus, we are forced to conclude that those who hold to this syrupy worldview are seeking to impose an anti-biblical presupposition onto a Bible that teaches a contrary worldview. Of course this results in conflict!

In contrast, we must view the Bible from its own worldview. Consider Psalm 34:15-16:

The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous
     and His ears toward their cry.
The face of the Lord is against those who do evil,
    to cut off the memory of them from the earth.

In these two verses, an example of Hebrew parallelism, we see God in two distinct fashions: in the first two lines, there is a kind God; in the latter two lines, there is an unkind God, as the two sides of a single coin. Do these two verses confirm the view I described above? I am sure those folks would say so.