attitude of God towards the human race. Who will deny it? Then when we read that "God is angry with the wicked every day?" what are we to think? Does it not obviously mean that from the viewpoint of the wicked the Lord is angry with him, just as the evildoer thinks of the police and law courts as hostile to him,—or, let us say, as angry with him? For a people who were idolaters and immersed in evil living, as were the people to whom the Old Testament came, who persisted in their evil living, as is witnessed by the denunciations of the Prophets against them, it is evident that God did seem to be angry with them; and with those who were trying to live decent lives when they saw what happened to the wicked it did appear that the Lord was angry with the wicked. They did not realize that evil punishes itself, and that God's attitude is forever that of the father of the Prodigal Son.
In both Old and New Testament good-intentional people, as well as the wicked, assumed that God was like themselves in anger, hatred and revenge, and God allowed them so to think of Him because of the need to try to maintain among them a semblance of order. They could not easily comprehend that the Lord's statement through Jeremiah was always true, namely, "I have loved thee with an everlasting love, therefore with loving kindness have I drawn thee." This means that the Lord was always loving, always patient, always striving to save mankind from destruction. In the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi, the Lord says very definitely, and conclusively, "I am the Lord, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed." Is it not evident that God is not like a man to give way to anger, hatred and revenge. Thus when we read that "God is angry with the wicked every day," we realize at once that this is only an appearance and not the real fact.
But writers in both the Old and New Testament yielded to the appearance and believed God to be an avenger, ready, and eager to punish evildoers, and even constructed hell to be an appropriate place to punish them eternally. They were quite ready to accept the attitude of the heathen world and believe that God needed to be propitiated and appeased, ready to believe that sin must somehow be expiated, that since "the wages of sin is death," death must
