God's Anger

   I highly apologize to anyone who bothers to read this blog about not having posted in the past few weeks. I try to at least once a week, but as you can tell I fail a lot. I have been very busy though lately with SAT prep, but that is now out of the way (thank God!) and so I have a little more time on my hands.
  Anyway, I wanted to talk er...write a little about something that has been on my mind a lot lately. And that is God's anger. I think we tend to get too caught up in the "God is a forgiving God thing" that we forget His anger. Don't get me wrong, he is. He is amazingly forgiving. More then we ever deserve. It says in the Psalms;

"For His anger last only a moment, but His favor lasts a lifetime." (30:5)

  But I think that we tend to forget his anger. We forget how much he abhors sin, and how it pains Him to see us fall. I think we will also use the fact that he is forgiving as an excuse. It makes us not so guilty to do something wrong if we've already been forgiven.  We also forget that God is a jealous God. He is very jealous of our worship and praise and hates it when we give that to something or someone else. Just look at the Isrealites history. They were continually turning away from God to worship false gods, and He got really angry. He sent prophets and strong leaders to bring them back, but often they wouldn't. Or they would but then a year later they would be right back to where they had been. So God would eventually punish them.
  Obviously He doesn't punish us in quite the ways he did to the Israelites. And I think that's where the problem is. Because we're not seeing cities destroyed by God or all the first born males dying we think God doesn't get angry. He does. He is a jealous God. He's jealous of your love. Of your praise and worship. He covets it. It's a sweet smell to him when we bring him glory.
  I'm not trying to say be in cowardly fear that God is going to kill you the moment you do something wrong, I just think that sometimes we need to realize that God does get angry, and he hates our sin even though he does forgive us of it.

Thoughts and/or comments are highly appreciated and welcome. I really would love to hear what you think of this, or if you see any flaws in my reasoning (which I'm sure there are.)