Teaching Isaiah and Wrestling with Wrath

I have 3 weeks in my class in Isaiah, and these final few lessons are never easy.

These chapters aren’t light.
They aren’t comfortable.
They press into the hardest realities of Scripture: sin, bloodshed, wrath, justice, and the costliness of redemption.

I knew this section was coming when I laid out the series, but now that I’m here — sitting day after day with Isaiah 63 and Isaiah 53 — I feel the weight of it. I feel the ache. And I’m asking for prayer as I navigate these waters.

Because Isaiah won’t let us look away from the disturbing parts of the human condition.
He forces us to acknowledge what we often avoid: the universal problem of sin and the unavoidable need for atonement.

The Movie Experience That Still Haunts Me

I've been thinking a lot about Mel Gibson's film-  The Passion of the Christ.

When it first came out, I didn’t want to see it. A friend who went early on told me something that stuck with me:

I asked him, “Were people buying popcorn?”
He said, “They were buying it… but they weren’t eating it.”

That told me everything.

My wife and I eventually went near the end of the run.
The theater was nearly empty: a couple in the front row, one man alone in the back.
It was solemn.

As the film unfolded — as I watched the suffering servant bruised, beaten, and crushed — I wept in a way I’ve never experienced in a theater. For the first time, the prophetic imagery wasn’t abstract. It wasn’t academic. It was flesh and blood, pain and silence, wrath and love converging on a single figure.

That memory is with me now as I approach Isaiah again.

Isaiah 63 — The Winepress of Wrath

Isaiah 63 is among the most jarring passages in the Bible.

“Who is this… with garments stained crimson?”
“I have trodden the winepress alone… their lifeblood spattered on my garments.”
— Isaiah 63:1–3

It is violent.
It is unsettling.
It is meant to be.

This is what sin deserves.
This is how holy God responds to deep, unrepentant evil.
It is not overreach. It is not temper. It is justice.

Isaiah is answering a question that began in the opening chapters of Scripture.

The First Cry for Justice — Genesis 4

When Cain kills Abel, God confronts him with these words:

“The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.”
— Genesis 4:10

Blood doesn’t disappear.
Blood speaks.
It testifies.
It demands an answer.

And Isaiah 63 is God saying:
“I have heard that cry — all of them — and I will answer.”

This thread runs through the entire biblical story, through every age, through every nation, through every tragedy. Every drop of human blood spilled in violence cries out for truth and reckoning.

It’s no wonder John Steinbeck borrowed Isaiah’s imagery for The Grapes of Wrath.
He saw suffering — widespread, grinding, unjust — and instinctively reached for the ancient metaphor of the winepress.

When the poor are crushed long enough, their suffering becomes a cry for righteousness.
When evil is ignored long enough, the world groans for judgment.

Isaiah gives language to that groaning.

Isaiah’s imagery shaped also America again through the Battle Hymn of the Republic:

“He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored…”

Julia Ward Howe understood that God cannot and will not overlook deep injustice.
History bends toward judgment because God bends toward justice.

All of this makes Isaiah 63 hard to teach.
Because teaching it honestly means acknowledging the horror of sin and the horror of judgment — both the ones we commit and the ones we endure.

Isaiah 53 — The One Who Is Crushed

But then Isaiah turns.
The same prophet who gives us the winepress of wrath gives us the suffering servant who steps into it.

“He was pierced for our transgressions;
He was crushed for our iniquities…”
— Isaiah 53:5

The terrifying part is that Isaiah 63 shows what the world deserves.
The astonishing part is that Isaiah 53 shows who bears it.

The Warrior becomes the Lamb.
The Judge becomes the Substitute.
The One who treads the winepress becomes the One who is crushed in it.

I don’t know a way to teach that lightly.
And I’m not sure I’m meant to.

The Final Pressing

The imagery doesn’t diminish in the New Testament:

“The winepress was trodden… and blood flowed…”
— Revelation 14:20

This is the end of the story of sin:
not ignored,
not minimized,
but fully dealt with.

And this is precisely why the cross matters — because it stands between us and this final reckoning.

I keep returning to these words:

“Whoever believes in Him is not condemned,
but whoever does not believe is condemned already…”
— John 3:18

The problem is not hypothetical.
Condemnation is real.
Wrath is real.
Judgment is real.

But so is deliverance.
So is mercy.
So is substitution.

This is the tension I feel while preparing to teach.

Paul says:

“Never avenge yourselves…
Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”
— Romans 12:19

One of the most important voices in the modern conversation about forgiveness and justice is Miroslav Volf, a Yale theologian who grew up in war-torn Croatia during the Balkan conflicts. Volf is not theorizing about evil from the safety of an armchair — he watched neighbors murdered, communities destroyed, families uprooted, and entire regions descend into cycles of revenge.

His reflections on violence, judgment, and forgiveness have become foundational for Christian thinking on justice, and they speak directly into the world of Isaiah 63, Isaiah 53, Romans 12, and the problem of sin.

Volf’s argument can be stated simply:

If there is no divine judgment, there can be no human forgiveness.

And he says it without flinching.

In Exclusion and Embrace, Volf writes this now-famous line:

“My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many…

…the only means of prohibiting all recourse to violence by ourselves
is to insist that violence is legitimate only when it comes from God.”
— Exclusion and Embrace, p. 302 (emphasis added)

Then he adds the devastating logic beneath it:

“If God were not angry at injustice and deception
and did not make the final end to violence,
that God would not be worthy of worship.”
— Exclusion and Embrace, p. 304

This is the opposite of what many assume today.

We often think:

Belief in divine judgment makes people harsh and violent.

But Volf argues the truth is the reverse:

Belief in divine judgment is the only thing that keeps people from becoming violent.

Wrath is not the contradiction of grace.
Wrath is the foundation of forgiveness.

So here I am:
Sitting with Isaiah 63 and Isaiah 53.
Sitting with the winepress and the suffering servant.
Sitting with Genesis and Revelation and John and Romans.
Sitting with the universal human tragedy of violence and sin.
Sitting with my own tears in that movie theater years ago.

And I feel the weight.

I want to teach truthfully — not minimizing sin, not sensationalizing judgment.
I want to handle the wrath of God in a way that is biblically honest and pastorally careful.
I want to show the depth of the bad news so the good news can be understood — not rushed, not cheapened, not softened.

But I also want the people I teach to walk away with hope.
With clarity.
With gratitude.
With worship.

And so I’m asking for prayer.
Pray that I will navigate these chapters with humility and love.
Pray that people will not recoil from the hard passages but see the purpose behind them.
Pray that somewhere in the struggle, God will meet us — in His justice, in His mercy, in His truth.

I’m wrestling.
And I’m asking the Lord to make something beautiful out of it.