Is God bipolar?

Sunday, February 1st, 2026

Forgive the irreverence of this "catchy" title, but the Bible, which is the Word of God, points as often to the wrath of God on the wicked as it points to His love towards the lost sinners.

Thankfully this same Bible gives us a significant clue in the following two passages:

(Isaiah 61:1-2 NKJV) "The Spirit of the Lord GOD [is] upon Me, Because the LORD has anointed Me To preach good tidings to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, To proclaim liberty to the captives, And the opening of the prison to [those who are] bound; To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, And the day of vengeance of our God;"

(Luke 4:18-19 NKJV) "The Spirit of the LORD [is] upon Me, Because He has anointed Me To preach the gospel to [the] poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, To proclaim liberty to [the] captives And recovery of sight to [the] blind, To set at liberty those who are oppressed; To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD."

The first passage is from Isaiah in the Old Testament while the second one is from Jesus in the New Testament quoting Isaiah, but notice how Jesus significantly skipped the part about proclaiming the day of vengeance of our God.

Then, a bit further down the line, Jesus says the following:

(Luke 4:21 NKJV) "Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."

In other words, only the part of the scripture that Jesus quoted was fulfilled then, not the part of the scripture about the vengeance of the Lord, which is why He didn't quote it.

Those were therefore two separate prophecies. There is one prophecy about the acceptable year of the Lord, and there is another prophecy about the day of vengeance of the Lord.

The scripture about the acceptable year of the Lord has been fulfilled with the first coming of Christ, his sacrifice on the cross, and is still being fulfilled to this day (John 1:29).

The scripture about the day of vengeance of our God will follow and will be fulfilled after the second coming of Christ, the rapture, the battle of Armageddon, etc. But let's come back on this subject a bit later down the line.

For the moment, let's zero in on the acceptable year of the Lord.

During the acceptable year of the Lord, He is giving everyone a chance to be saved (Luke 19:10, John 3:16 ). At the moment, He has not been sent to judge us (John 3:17). In fact, we are the ones automatically condemning ourselves by refusing His offer of salvation (John 3:18, Galatians 6:7), in other words by refusing this free gift to be transformed, we remain the sinners we are, and thus we are making ourselves incompatible with the new world that is to come (Isaiah 11:9).

The mere fact that we were born in this fallen world means that we were born faulty to start with (Psalm 51:5).

In fact we are (or have been) so faulty that it's impossible to realize to what extreme degree we are (or were) faulty. To judge how we are doing, we usually compare ourselves with others, and since we can always find worse, that make us feel pretty good and righteous (2nd Corinthians 10:12). Alas, those feelings don't make it so, far from it.

This fallen state directly stems from the original sin of Adam and Eve, who chose to believe in Satan's lies rather than in God's word, love and care. Didn't He warn them of what would happen if they ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?

Those consequences were not a punishment of God, as most of us tend to think, but simply the consequence of knowing what evil actually is (which they couldn't even imagine since up to that point they were basically living in Heaven on Earth) .

The irony is that it couldn't be any clearer, simply by the name of that tree: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Imagine a child who were told not to play with fire so as not to be burned... who goes ahead anyways... gets burned... and becomes persuaded that his father punished him for disobeying him by getting him burned... Duh!!

When the Bible states that the wages of sin is death, it isn't a punishment... it states a fact, a consequence. Just like, due to the law of gravity, if today you were to jump from a sky scraper, you would die... it wouldn't be a punishment of God... It's just the way gravity works, there is nothing personal about it.

Now let's come back a moment to the prophecy about "the day of vengeance of our God". How come it hasn't happened yet? Here again the Bible tells us the answer:

(2nd Peter 3:9 NKJV) "The Lord is not slack concerning [His] promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance."

God is love (1st John 4:8,9), and He loves us so much that he wants to restore us to His original plan, before Adam and Eve original sin.

And for God to bring a new Heaven on earth, He will have to proceed with a major upgrade where anything from this old world that is no longer compatible with this new world to come will have to be discarded.

So "the acceptable year of the Lord" is kind of like doing a backup of all important data that needs to be saved before executing a major upgrade. In other words, for the moment the Lord is in the business of saving as much souls as possible before putting an end to this old world as we know it and ushering His own Kingdom on earth.

Now imagine, for a moment, that before installing a new operating system on your computer, phone or whatever, you get a warning message telling you that all data and program will be erased and therefore you should make a backup and save it first. But then you decide that it is not necessary... Well in that case the permanent deletion of these items would definitely not be a punishment from your new and better system. It would simply be the natural and logical consequence of you own choice, what you purposely decided to do.

(John 3:19 NKJV) "And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil."

Now doesn't it make sense? During the acceptable year of the Lord, God doesn't judge and condemn... It is men who condemn themselves simply by not accepting the pardon that He offers freely to everyone through the Gospel.