I sat down with Dr. Brad Jersak to talk about wrath, judgment, Bart Ehrman's hard questions, and the one claim that holds his whole theology together: God looks like Jesus.
Brad Jersak is a theologian and the principal of St. Stephen's University, and his central conviction is the one Sound of Heaven preaches every week. Jesus is the clearest and final picture of the Father, so every scary image of God gets reread through Him.
We agree with him on that, and on wrath, loudly. We part ways on the final outcome for people who reject Christ, and I will tell you exactly where and why.
Below is the episode, what Brad teaches in his published work, and where we stand together and apart.
Principal of St. Stephen's University in New Brunswick, where he also directs the School of Theology and Culture and teaches theology and religious studies.
A PhD in theology and religious studies from Bangor University in Wales, after degrees in biblical studies and a post doctoral fellowship at Nottingham.
By his university's account he spent twenty years in pastoral ministry before teaching full time.
More than twenty books, including the More Christlike series: A More Christlike God and A More Christlike Word, plus Her Gates Will Never Be Shut and Can You Hear Me?
You can read his full profile on the St. Stephen's University faculty page. I brought him on the Dig In Podcast because his work has given a lot of people a way to keep the Bible and keep Jesus when they felt they had to choose one.
The conversation went into uncomfortable territory, and Brad handled it with care and clarity. His vision of God starts and ends with Jesus Christ crucified. Here is the ground we covered.
Why Brad believes Jesus, and especially Jesus on the cross, is not one revelation of God among many but the true image of the Father.
How that one conviction changes the way we read Old Testament violence, judgment, and holy war.
Wrath as the self destructive consequence of sin rather than God's active vengeance.
Why the traditional teaching of eternal conscious torment cannot sit beside the character of Jesus.
How Brad responds to the questions scholars like Ehrman raise, and why the answer is to dig deeper instead of dismissing them.
What it means for God to judge in righteousness, and why a distorted picture of God produces fear based religion.
Watch the full episode on YouTube, or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Every episode also lands on the channel.
Every topic in this episode comes back to one question. If Jesus shows us what God is like, what do we do with the parts of the Bible that seem to show someone else?
This is the heart of Brad's work, and it is the heart of ours. Jesus is not a partial glimpse of God that we balance against other pictures. He is the full revelation. When anything in Scripture seems to tell a different story about the Father, Jesus has the final word.
“Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.”
John 14:9Hebrews 1:3 calls the Son the exact representation of God's being. Not a softer version of a harsher God behind the curtain. The exact representation.
So when we read the Old Testament, we read it as a real record of real people coming to know God over centuries. They heard Him truly, and they also sometimes put their own fears, wars and tribal loyalties in His mouth. The Bible is God breathed, and it was written through human authors in real cultures. Jesus is where the picture comes fully into focus. I unpack that in more detail in what it means to call the Bible the Word of God and in how the Old and New Testaments relate.
The original version of this page opened with a quote credited to Brad: God has always been like Jesus, we haven't always known this, but now we do. That sentence is actually Brian Zahnd's, from his book Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, and he has been saying it for years, including in his post God Is Like Jesus. Brad would agree with every word of it. We just want the credit in the right place.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
Most of us were handed a picture of wrath as God losing His temper and needing someone to take it out on. Brad pushes back on that hard. In one article he writes that Paul “redefines wrath as passive, as divine consent, as ‘giving us over’ (Romans 1) to our choices and their consequences.”
“Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts.”
Romans 1:24An angry God whose fury has to land on somebody, so He pours it out on His own Son to calm Himself down.
A God who opposes what destroys us, lets sin reap what it sows, and at the cross absorbs the violence of the world and answers it with forgiveness.
We land in the same place. Wrath is real, and it is love standing against harm, not a Father with an anger problem. I walk through the Greek words and the Romans 1 pattern in what the wrath of God actually is, and the cross itself in what the Bible means by atonement, so I will not repeat all of that here.
How does Paul describe wrath in Romans 1?
Romans 1 says three times that God gave them over. Wrath there looks like consequences God allows, not a lightning bolt. That is the reading Brad and Sound of Heaven share.
Here is the honest part. Brad and I both reject eternal conscious torment. We do not believe the God who looks like Jesus keeps people alive forever in order to hurt them. But we answer the next question differently.
In Her Gates Will Never Be Shut, Brad takes his title from Revelation 21:25, where the gates of the New Jerusalem are never shut. He surveys the traditional options and leans toward what is usually called hopeful universalism: a hope, not a guarantee, that God's mercy may reach even those who have not said yes to Christ in this life. He is careful here. The book's own description warns that the easy pop universalism of our day sounds more like denial than hope, and says “Mercy triumphs over judgment; it does not skirt it.” He is not saying nothing matters.
Sound of Heaven holds that the wicked perish. Eternal life is a gift, not something every soul has by default, and those who finally reject it do not live forever in pain. They cease to exist. Jesus called that Gehenna, and the Bible's own words for it are destruction, perishing and death.
So we agree with Brad against endless torment, and we disagree with him on universal restoration, even as a hope. We think the plain reading of John 3:16 and Romans 6:23 is that life is given and the alternative is its absence. That is our position, and it is a real disagreement between brothers, not a reason to stop listening to him.
“For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Romans 6:23The same goes for the episode's point on restorative justice. We agree that God's judgment is never cruel and that He is always working to restore. Where someone refuses life to the very end, we believe the outcome is destruction, not a restoration that finally overrides their no. If you want the longer case, read what the Bible means by Gehenna and what eternal life is.
Part of why this episode matters is the cultural moment around it. Bart Ehrman, professor emeritus of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has written bestselling books such as Misquoting Jesus and God's Problem. His work raises questions about how the biblical text was copied and handed down, about tensions between passages, and about how a good God relates to suffering.
Many who walked away after reading work like his did not reject Jesus. They could not reconcile a violent, tribal picture of God in parts of Scripture with the Christ of the Gospels.
Brad's response in our conversation was not to wave those questions off. It was to dig deeper, and to read the whole story with Jesus as the guide. We think that is right. A flat Bible where every verse carries the same weight and every portrayal of God is equally final cannot survive honest questions. A Bible read through Jesus can.
Maybe you are in the middle of pulling your faith apart right now, and the pictures of God you grew up with feel impossible to believe. You are not in trouble with God for asking. Honest questions are not rebellion.
Start with Jesus. Look at how He treats the people everyone else wrote off. That is what the Father is like. If you want someone to walk with you, ask us to pray with you, or come sit with us on a Sunday.
If you have ever sat in a pew, heard a sermon about wrath or eternal torment, and thought quietly to yourself that it did not sound like Jesus, this conversation is for you.
Brad Jersak has asked the hardest questions in public for a long time. What he found on the other side is what we preach: a God who looks exactly like Jesus, who is not angry with you, and who went to the cross to heal, not to vent. We differ with him on the final end of those who refuse that life, and we say so plainly. We agree on the thing that matters most. Jesus shows us the Father, and every other picture bows to Him.
For related reading, see the character of God, what it means that God is love and why Jesus had to die.
Brad Jersak and Sound of Heaven agree that God is like Jesus and that wrath must be reread through the cross, and we differ on the end, because we believe eternal life is a gift and those who refuse it perish.
Send us your question or a prayer request and somebody at Sound of Heaven will pray and walk through it with you.
Brad Jersak is a Canadian theologian and author who serves as principal of St. Stephen's University in New Brunswick, where he directs the School of Theology and Culture. He has written more than twenty books, including A More Christlike God, A More Christlike Word and Her Gates Will Never Be Shut. He joined Pastor Johnny Ova on the Dig In Podcast to talk about wrath and judgment.
The book argues that Jesus is the clearest and final revelation of what God is like, so every image of God in Scripture and tradition has to be measured by Him. From there Brad rereads wrath, judgment and the cross. Sound of Heaven shares that starting point. We believe Jesus is the exact representation of the Father, and that every hard passage in the Bible gets read through Him.
In Her Gates Will Never Be Shut he leans toward what is usually called hopeful universalism. He holds out hope, not a guarantee, that God's mercy may reach even those who did not say yes to Christ in this life, and he criticizes easy pop universalism that skips judgment. Sound of Heaven respectfully differs. We believe eternal life is a gift, and that those who finally reject it perish rather than being restored or kept alive forever in torment.
Brad reads wrath through the cross. Following Romans 1, he describes wrath as God giving people over to the choices they insist on and the consequences that follow, rather than God losing His temper and needing someone to punish. Sound of Heaven agrees. Wrath is real, it is love standing against what destroys us, and the New Testament's wrath to come was aimed at the judgment on Jerusalem in AD 70, not at believers today.
Take them seriously instead of dismissing them. Ehrman, a religious studies scholar at the University of North Carolina, has written popular books on how the biblical text was copied and on God and suffering. The honest answer is not a flat Bible where every verse carries equal weight. It is reading the whole story through Jesus, who shows us what the Father is truly like. That approach can stand up to hard questions.