Singer Madalyn Rae hit the nail on the head when she said: “I never understood the weight of the cross until I understood the depth of my sin, and I can only understand the depth of my sin when I understand the holiness of God in comparison.” Profound truth exuberates from these words. And yet, it seems to address a conversation many of us prefer to avoid.

Whether it be God’s holiness or His steadfast love, Christians only do themselves a disservice by avoiding the topic of God’s wrath. Surely, I can’t fault anyone for being uncomfortable about it. Certainly, God’s wrath is not the most digestible outworking of our Lord. On the contrary, it can be quite frightening. However, it is in better understanding God’s wrath that we better understand His holiness, which happens to be the only attribute of God elevated to the third degree when the angels cry in Isaiah 6:3, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!”

And so, to better understand God’s wrath, we must do so through the understanding that God’s holiness means He is other, not like man, completely righteous and pure. And because we are not perfectly righteous and pure, it befits us to acknowledge that we may never fully understand God’s wrath against unrighteousness. However, that does not mean it does not exist.

God’s wrath is very real. It’s His judgement against unholiness. Consider this: without God’s wrath, what reason would there have been to send Jesus to the cross? You see, what Madalyn rightly acknowledged, is that God’s wrath needed to be appeased because of His holiness. The Bible says that in Adam we all have sinned. We are totally depraved, not in the sense that we are the worst sinners that we could possibly be, but that we are, indeed, sinners. We need to be saved, and the only logical question that follows is: saved from what?

If you said God’s wrath, you are exactly right. What makes the weight of the cross so mighty is the fact that Jesus took on the penalty for our sins. Paul wrote in Romans 6:23 that “the wages of sin is death.” And yet, because Christ died in our place, bearing the weight of all sin, conquering it once and for all, we in Christ will never taste death.

Simply put, we can’t fully understand or appreciate our salvation without understanding why we need salvation in the first place. We need salvation because we’re sinners, in a fallen world, who rebelled against our Creator. Our holy God cannot face unholiness, and therefore, there needed to be a way for us to become holy and righteous. This way is found only in Jesus Christ. He is our righteousness. In Him, we may pursue holiness. And if His work on the cross is what saved us from God’s wrath, then without it, the only alternative is that we are forced to face the terrifying wrath of God.

Without Christ’s sacrifice, there would have been no way to atone for our own sins. The door to glory would be shut in our face, and we would never be face-to-face, in harmony with our King. He wouldn’t be our Savior, because without His finished work, we would still need saving. But praise God that we have been saved, God’s wrath was satisfied, and we are welcomed into the Kingdom of Heaven with love and assurance! However, we can only praise God for these things in the way we ought to, with its life altering impact, if we have a wholistic approach to Scripture and our God.

A great example of how not to handle the reality of God’s wrath is found in the early Christian figure, Marcion of Sinope. The issue of Marcion’s philosophy was well summarized by the late theologian, R.C. Sproul:

“Marcion hated the God of the Old Testament. He believed that the God of the Old Testament, the God of wrath and judgment and all of that sort of thing, was a God that was not worthy of Marcion’s adoration and worship and respect, and he didn’t believe that Jehovah in the Old Testament was really God. He believed that he was the creator of the world, but Marcion believed that the Old Testament deity, Jehovah, was not the high God, the highest God, but was sort of a second-level God.”

There’s a lot wrong here. But ultimately, what this sort of thinking led to, as Sproul went on to explain, was Marcion creating his own “expurgated version of the Bible. He only included books in the New Testament that fostered and championed his idea of a distinction between the loving God of the New Covenant and the ‘mean and nasty’ God of the Old Testament.” For instance, Marcion’s manipulated Bible excluded the entire Gospel according to Matthew because of the many Old Testament references.

Portions of Luke and the other gospels were left out “anytime the Gospel writer [recorded] Jesus say something complimentary about Jehovah in the Old Testament.” All this to say, Sproul quipped, “Marcion gave us the first scissors-and-paste version of the Bible where he actually tried to play around with the writings of the apostles and dismiss what he didn’t like and keep what he did like and doctor up the sources.”

But what must be understood by anyone who claims to be Christian is that this is simply not how it works.

We’re not allowed to cherry-pick Scripture to dig out the parts that suit our preferences while ignoring the parts that don’t. Last time I checked, 2 Timothy made it clear that all Scripture is God-breathed. Distorting Scripture, beloved, is the work of the devil and hands that are deeply entrenched in sin. When Jesus was in the wilderness being tempted by Satan, what happened? Satan manipulated portions of Scripture to try and trick Jesus. It’s interesting because, well, don’t we see that exact same thing today? It’s the infamous left-wing, progressive ideologies we face today that want nothing to do with God, yet conveniently, they will try and use God to their advantage when — and only when — they’re able to distort His character to fit their ideas.

The point in saying all this is simple: Don’t be like Marcion, or anyone like him. When tempted to avoid the conversation of God’s wrath, which is, understandably, an uncomfortable conversation to have, we mustn’t allow ourselves to slip into the dangerous practice of cutting out the parts of God we don’t like as much. Rather, the believer is most radically transformed, most humble and reverent, when his or her primary pursuit is to come to an unabridged knowledge of God. We don’t become more like Christ by detaching ourselves from the aspects that most explain His holiness. We don’t learn to fear Him in the way we’re called to in Scripture by whitewashing the most awesome and incomprehensible parts about Him.

Marcion thought it was okay to completely abandon parts of Scripture he didn’t like. But beloved, if we did that, hardly anything would be left! The entire gospel, as correctly defined through an understanding of God’s holiness and our sinfulness, would cease to exist. The very fact that we need saving at all is inherently offensive when we persist in our opposition to our need of Christ and our need of righteousness.

It only takes one sentence to create a great example of a wholistic approach to faith: “I never understood the weight of the cross until I understood the depth of my sin, and I can only understand the depth of my sin when I understand the holiness of God in comparison.” I could never fully appreciate my King, the salvation He provided, and the death and wrath I have been spared from without first acknowledging that I needed to be saved from wrath and death. And that thought may initially be unsettling, but that is why it should immediately drive us to God’s love.

God is holy, holy, holy, but He is also love. And in His perfect and holy love, He made a way for undeserving sinners, wretched and defiled, to be washed clean and given eternal life. The door to glory is open for those who repent and believe, and for those who walk the straight and narrow to get to it, they will never be cast out. It’s glorious, it’s beautiful, and its magnitude only swells to unsearchable heights when this good news is put directly beside the bad news.

Praise God we have both to reflect on. And praise God He gave us this good news at all.