What You Should Know about God’s Other Emotions

What’s the first emotion that comes to mind when you think of God?

If you said “love,” there’s a good reason. 1 John 4:8 says, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

But is it possible to jump too quickly to the “love” part, to the exclusion of God’s other feelings?

Do we realize he has other feelings?

We can sometimes do our Heavenly Father a disservice by seeing him as a jolly grandfather, patting us on the head and filling our pockets with candy, content to send us on our way and forget about the hard work of shaping our characters.

The clever sentiment comes to mind,  “God’s a good God in a good mood.”

Yes, God is good, and we can confidently bring our needs before him. But his Word makes it clear he experiences a wide range of feelings, not all of which are happy.

“God is a righteous judge, and a God who feels indignation every day,” says Psalm 7:11.

That doesn’t sound like a good mood to me. It sounds like he is angry. Every single day.

Other Scripture passages tell us God gets jealous, rejoices, grieves, delights. This is no two-dimensional caricature we are serving, but a real person with real feelings that go much deeper than we often realize. Here’s the thing:

We cannot fully appreciate the love of God until we understand the intensity of his other emotions. (Tweet that.)

In Heaven is for Real, author Todd Burpo describes how his little boy’s near-death experience affected him:

“When I was a kid, I always wondered why the cross, Jesus’ crucifixion, was such a big deal. If God the Father knew he was going to raise his son from the dead, how was that a sacrifice?

But now I understand why God doesn’t view Easter as just the endgame, just the empty tomb. I understand completely. I would have given anything, anything, to stop Colton’s suffering…

…I am convinced that he (turned his back on Jesus) because if he had kept on watching, he couldn’t have gone through with it.”

God. Feels. Deeply.

God gets angry with our sin because he loves us. He weeps over our heartaches because he loves us. He gets jealous when we bow to strange gods, because he loves us. He sings with joy over us because he loves us.

The point is, God cares. And caring costs.

If you’ve ever found yourself in gut-wrenching, agonizing prayer over someone you love, you know what I mean.

I recently found myself in that position, praying for a young woman whom I’d spoken with at my workplace. We had gone over her options regarding a pregnancy decision.

She’d made her decision. The pregnancy was over.

At home that evening, I couldn’t stop thinking about what happened. Even though I realize I am responsible to people, not for them, and even though I believe that children who die in the womb are alive in the presence of Jesus, the grief welling up in me would not be contained.

I sobbed until I could scarcely breathe, trembling violently, deeply mourning the loss of this one little baby.

Then it hit me.

I was feeling what God was feeling.

I’m made in his likeness. I have feelings because he does.

God is indignant every day because his image-bearers are aborted, because women and children are sexually abused, because the poor are enslaved,  because of all the other horrible things we do to each other.

He is indignant precisely because he is love.

Do you see God as a person with intense feelings?

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