Darren's Response to R.C. Sproul on God's Wrath
R.C. Sproul is asked this question: "Since God is slow to anger and patient, then why, when man first sinned, was His punishment so severe and longlasting?"
It is worth looking at Sproul's reaction to this question. He starts to make a point that Adam could have died right that moment, and by grace he still lived on in a world that is not so bad - this could have been more severe. But he doesn't continue the thought, maybe because he knows that it leads into the terrible pain and sufering we see in our world now and eventually into eternal hell (which makes one wonder, when he asks "why wasn't the punishment infinitely more severe?" - what could be more severe than an infinite burning hell?).
He flounders at it a bit, before getting angry at the audience for even daring to ask the question. It is a remarkably sad display of avoiding the question and trying to guilt trip his flock from even having such thoughts. It doesn't satisfy the soul and will never reconcile those who are not Christian to our Heavenly Father.
Darren gives an alternative answer to this, one in which he really tries to answer it rather than thinking that God would be upset that we even thought the question. And Darren adds his own twist, suggesting that the change in the physical universe is also connected to our own microbiome, especially our gut.
And it is interesting to see that this comment was met with replies of gratitude, showing that God's church wants answers on this:
There is an alternate explanation.
The existence of the tree wasn't an act of cruelty — it was an act of fairness. Satan had leveled a charge against God, claiming His laws were unjust and tyrannical — that He was the kind of ruler who imposed arbitrary rules and punished those who broke them. The tree was the proving ground for that claim. For the test to be legitimate, free will had to be real, which meant a genuine alternative had to exist.
But to understand what actually happened, we first have to understand what kind of law God operates on.
There are two fundamentally different kinds of law. Imposed law is what most people unconsciously assume — an authority sets a rule, and when it's broken, that authority personally comes down on the offender as enforcer and executioner. Natural law is different. Its consequences are built into the fabric of reality itself. God isn't the enforcer — He's the designer, describing what the design produces. When He said "the day you eat of it you will die," He wasn't issuing a threat. He was describing natural law — like a doctor warning that disconnecting from a life support system produces death. The doctor isn't threatening you. He's telling you how reality works.
The consequence of eating wasn't arbitrary punishment waiting to be administered from a throne. It was inherent to the act itself. To eat was to side with Satan's claim — to distrust God's character and word. And distrust of the very source of life is not a neutral act. It was the beginning of death from the inside out.
What happened inside Adam in that moment wasn't merely psychological — it was a fundamental shift in the frequency at which he existed. Before the fall, Adam lived in a state of open trust, awe, and love toward his Creator. Modern science gives us a glimpse of what that would have looked like physiologically — a nervous system at rest, coherent heart rhythms, cells operating in their optimal state, the body's systems in harmony with one another. There is a measurable difference in the body between a person operating from love and one operating from fear. Hormones, brainwave patterns, cellular function — all of it shifts depending on the internal state a person inhabits.
When Adam chose distrust, he didn't just change his mind. He changed his frequency. Fear, doubt, and suspicion activate entirely different biological systems. The stress response floods the body. Coherence breaks down. What was once open and receptive becomes guarded and contracted. This wasn't just an emotional shift — it was a physiological one, and it was the beginning of decay.
And that shift didn't stay contained within Adam. His gut changed. The microbiome — that vast ecosystem of bacteria living within him that modern science is only beginning to understand — responded to that hormonal and neurological shift. We know today that stress fundamentally alters gut bacteria composition, and that the gut-brain axis means that what happens emotionally is inseparable from what happens microbiologically.
We see a parallel in the meat we consume today. Animals slaughtered under prolonged stress and fear produce measurably different meat — higher cortisol levels, different pH, altered cellular structure — compared to animals killed quickly and humanely. The internal state of a living being literally changes the biochemical composition of its tissue. The same principle applied to Adam — his biology shifted the moment fear became his dominant frequency.
That altered microbiome was eventually deposited back into the soil. The bacteria that had thrived in a body living in harmony and trust were now different organisms — shaped by fear, cortisol, and biological stress. Those organisms entered the soil. The soil feeds the plants. The plants respond to their microbial environment. Whether you approach it from the angle of vibrational frequency directly affecting living systems, or from the more measurable pathway of microbiome → soil biology → plant behavior — you arrive at the same conclusion.
The thorns and thistles weren't a separate imposed decree stamped onto creation from outside. They were creation's own biological response to a fundamental change in the being it had been designed to live in harmony with. The thorn isn't just a botanical inconvenience. It's a mirror of what happened inside Adam.
But here's where the distortion deepened. Adam ate, and didn't immediately drop dead externally. And in that gap, the misreading began. Still operating under the assumption of imposed law — that God was the kind of ruler who personally executes punishment — Adam now waited for the retribution to come. He expected a God of wrath to follow through. So he hid. He blamed Eve. He was already living out the death that had begun inside him, but he interpreted his own fear as evidence that an angry God was coming for him.
That psychological need to scapegoat — to redirect guilt onto another to escape perceived divine retribution — became the template for how fallen humanity related to God. The sacrificial system grew out of that same misreading. And God, rather than forcing a correction, chose to condescend. He worked within that distorted imposed-law framework — not because it was true, but because it was the only language a fear-shaped humanity could receive at the time.
This condescension reached its fullest expression in Christ. For most of human history, and even up to our day, the cross has been understood through the lens of imposed law — that God's wrath needed satisfying, that a payment had to be made before forgiveness could be extended. But that was never God's requirement. It was man's. It was the inevitable conclusion of the lie Adam first believed in the garden — that God was the kind of being who imposed rules and demanded a price for breaking them.
God, being who He is, did not defend Himself against that accusation. Instead He entered into it fully. He allowed His Son — the express image of His character — to live and die among humanity, not to satisfy a divine legal demand, but to demonstrate from the inside out that no such demand ever existed. His character was never one of retribution. It was always one of love.
And the deepest tragedy is this: it was precisely that misreading of imposed law — the belief in a wrathful God requiring appeasement — that led humanity to kill Him. The lie that began in the garden culminated at the cross. Not because God required it, but because the distortion had grown so complete that love itself, when it finally stood before them in person, looked like a threat.
A tyrannical imposed-law ruler executes punishment himself. But what kind of tyrant absorbs the consequences of his own broken natural law to rescue the very people who broke it — without once defending himself?
The fall wasn't just a legal event. It was an ecological one. And the cross wasn't just a theological one. It was the fullest possible demonstration that God never operated on imposed law to begin with — and never will.
- Darren Siu (@funkyolax)
I suggest reading the comments in response to Darren's comment, and be encouraged that our message has the power to heal hearts and reconcile men to God.
Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade others...We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. (2 Corinthians 5:11,20)
