Pastor Brian Zahnd began "to question the theology of a wrathful God who delights in punishing sinners, and has started to explore the real nature of Jesus and His Father. The book isn’t only an interesting look at the context of some modern theological ideas; it’s also offers some profound insight into God’s love and eternal plan." —Relevant Magazine (Named one of the Top 10 Books of 2017) God is wrath? Or God is Love? In his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Puritan revivalist Jonathan Edwards shaped predominating American theology with a vision of God as angry, violent, and retributive. Three centuries later, Brian Zahnd was both mesmerized and terrified by Edwards’s wrathful God. Haunted by fear that crippled his relationship with God, Zahnd spent years praying for a divine experience of hell. What Zahnd experienced instead was the Father’s love—revealed perfectly through Jesus Christ—for all prodigal sons and daughters. In Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, Zahnd asks important questions like: Is seeing God primarily as wrathful towards sinners true or biblical? Is fearing God a normal expected behavior? And where might the natural implications of this theological framework lead us? Thoughtfully wrestling with subjects like Old Testament genocide, the crucifixion of Jesus, eternal punishment in hell, and the final judgment in Revelation, Zanhd maintains that the summit of divine revelation for sinners is not God is wrath, but God is love.

The prodigal son. The good Samaritan. A treasure hidden in a field. Most of us have heard these parables before. Yet if these oft-repeated stories strike us as merely sweet, heartwarming, or sentimental, we can be sure we've misread them. Jesus's parables are simultaneously working to conceal and reveal profound spiritual truths about God, humanity, the world, and the future—and we must learn to plumb their depths. A careful reading of the biblical text reveals the surprising ways in which such seemingly simple stories rebuke, subvert, and sabotage our sinful habits, perspectives, and priorities. Discarding the notion that Jesus's parables are nothing more than moralistic fables, Jared Wilson shows how each one is designed to drive us to Jesus in awe, need, faith, and worship.

Late-modern theology is marked by persistent and widespread uncertainty as to how the wrath of God can be taken up as a legitimate theme within dogmatics. Rather than engage the most fundamental task of clarifying the inner logic by which God's identity is revealed in scripture, privilege has been ceded either to cultural and textual criticism, to ostensibly self-evident moral sensibilities, or to the thematization of religious experience. The present work sets out to rectify this misstep. The result is a rigorous proposal for understanding wrath expressly within the doctrine of God, as a redemptive mode of divine righteousness.

My soul is in anguish. How long, O Lord, how long?' (Psalm 6:8) Personal tragedy and heartache. Accident, illness and infirmity. Drought, earthquake, tsunami. Terrorist atrocities. War, genocide, poverty, famine. All we have to do is live long enough, and we will suffer in one way or another. In this new edition of an excellent, widely appreciated study, Don Carson addresses the issue of evil and suffering with sensitivity, pastoral concern and biblical insight. He helps Christians prepare for the day when they have to experience a 'frowning providence', and face it with faith and hope because of an unshakable trust in the providence of God.