The wrath of God

But let us be quite clear about what the wrath of God means. It is the wrath of the lamb, the wrath of redeeming love. As such the very wrath of God is a sign of hope, not of utter destruction — for if God chastises us then we are sons and daughters, and not bastards, as the scripture puts it. Judgement and wrath mean that far from casting us off, God comes within the existence and relation between the creator and the creature, and negates the contradiction we have introduced into it by and in our sin. God's wrath means that God declares in no uncertain terms that what he has made he still affirms as his own good handiwork and will not cast it off into nothingness. Wrath means that God asserts himself against us as holy and loving Creator in the midst of our sin and perversity and alienation. God's wrath is God's judgement of sin, but it is a judgement in which God asserts that he is the God of the sinner and that the sinner is God's creature: it is a wrath that asserts God's ownership of the creature and that asserts the binding of the creature to the holy and loving God. And yet precisely as such, God's wrath is really a part of atonement, part of new creation, for it is his reaffirmation of his creature in spite of its sin and corruption. It is certainly a reaffirmation of it in judgement over against sin, but a reaffirmation that the creature belongs to God and that he refuses to cease to be its God and therefore refuses to let it go. God’s very wrath tells us that we are children of God. It is the rejection of evil, of our evil by the very love that God himself eternally is.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 250