God is love and has wrath

• Found an explanation of sorts Here: http://www.challies.com/christian-living/wrath-is-loves-response-to-sin

  
  

  Wittmer (a Protestant who has written a book called, Don’t Stop Believing , explains [says Tim Challies]'' how we can (and must) reconcile God’s wrath with his love. “Scripture says that God is love and that he has wrath. This means that love lies deeper than wrath in the character of God. Love is his essential perfection, without which he would not be who he is. Wrath is love’s response to sin. It is God’s voluntary gag reflex at anything that destroys his good creation. God is against sin because he is for us, and he will vent his fury on everything that damages us.”

  
  
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  Tim also makes a good point here:" Love is at God’s very core. 1 John 4:8 says, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” Through all of eternity, God has been love; he has existed in a state of love of Father to Son, Son to Spirit, Spirit to Father. There has never been a time that God has not been expressing love; nor will there ever be. But God’s wrath is far different. God has not always been wrathful. He has not always had to express anger. His anger is a reaction to a lack of love—a lack of love for him or a lack of love to others. Wrath is a response to sin. Therefore wrath did not exist until sin began to exist. And as sin came to be, God had to respond to it in a way that is consistent with his holy character. God’s response to sin is wrath. How could it be otherwise? Sin is cosmic treason against the Creator of the universe. He must respond."
  His conclusion:  “Every act of God flows from his love, even—and especially—those that demonstrate his wrath.”

  Is he a God of love or of wrath? God expresses both love and wrath, but where wrath is demonstrated, love is personified. God is love.   

  a few seconds ago · Edited · Like

In Scott Hahn's NT comments from Rom 1:18--"the wrath of God:  Not a surge of anger and emotion that overcomes God, but a fixed response or reflex of divine holiness toward sin."

also from comment 33 here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement


Welcome to Called To Communion. Nothing in my post presupposes that God’s love and God’s punishment are mutually exclusive. When God punishes a person for sin, He does not cease to love the person being punished, but He does not love that person’s sin. And it is precisely because of the person’s sin that he is punished. Also, God disciplines those He loves, to bring them to repentance, and even to lead them away from temptation. So in either punishment or discipline, God continues to love the recipient. But in both punishment and discipline, God does not love the person’s sin. Eternal punishment, separates those who receive it from fellowship with God.

from comment 53

(1) Would you say that Jesus’ death quenched God’s wrath, even if for different reasons than Protestants say this?

To answer that question, we should first clarify exactly what we mean by “God’s wrath.” (See what I wrote in the section titled “Does God hate sinners?“) When we humans speak of wrath, based on our experience of ourselves and other humans, we are referring to a movement in our sensible appetite. (cf. ST I q. 81 a.3) But there is no movement or change in God. The Church has infallibly taught (at the Fourth Lateran Council and at Vatican I) that God is immutable. So wrath predicated of God should not be conceived as a movement of passion or emotion in God. St. Thomas raises an objection to divine immutability, based on passages of Scripture which seem to speak of God drawing near to us. “Draw nigh to God and He will draw nigh to you” (James 4:8). In his reply to this objection, St. Thomas explains:

These things are said of God in Scripture metaphorically. For as the sun is said to enter a house, or to go out, according as its rays reach the house, so God is said to approach to us, or to recede from us, when we receive the influx of His goodness, or decline from Him. (ST I q.9 a.1)

That we can offend God the Father by our sin does not mean that our sin in any way changes Him, or elicits any emotion or sensation in Him. It means rather that our sin changes us in relation to God, such that we cannot be united to Him, but are separated from communion with Him. So, to answer your question, the gift of love Christ (in His human nature) gave to the Father through His obedience unto death, “quenched God’s wrath” in the sense that it made a way through justice for us to draw near to the Father, through union with Christ. Man (mankind), by sin, stood in a relation of infinite debt to God, because of our sin against God, by which we failed to give to God the love and obedience and honor that is due to Him. Christ, however, gave to God a superabundant gift by which mankind no longer stands in that relation of debt. Yet, if we (as individuals) refuse this gift, we remain separated from God eternally, and in that sense remain under the wrath of God.

Commenting on Eph 2.3 http://biblehub.com/commentaries/ephesians/2-3.htm Meyer's

As to the wrath of God,—which here, too, is not to be understood merely of that of the future judgment (Ritschl, de ira Dei, p. 17),—the holy emotion of absolute displeasure at evil, which is necessarily posited by absolute love to the good, and is thus the necessary principle of temporal and eternal punishment on the part of God (not the punishment itself), comp. on Romans 1:18.

from the same link only from the Expositors Greek commentary

 It is the Divine wrath that is in view here; as it is, indeed, in thirteen out of twenty occurrences in the Pauline writings, and that, too, whether with or without the definite article or the defining Θεοῦ (cf. Moule, in loc). This holy displeasure of God with sin is not inconsistent with His love, but is the reaction of that love against the denial of its sovereign rights of responsive love.