You can’t preach the Old Testament faithfully while avoiding the subject of God’s judgment. Especially in the current age where the idea that the God of the Old Testament is “evil”.
Bonus Bit – David chopping Goliath’s head off is an echo of, and an allusion to the story of the Philistines capturing the ark and it causing their idol to fall over until its head falls off.
Apparent injustice may in fact be a case of not knowing all the facts.
To make sense of the cross we need to understand that God is:
- Infinitely angry at sin
- Infinitely irrevocably committed to justice
- Staggeringly creative and innovative.
The God of the Cross is breathtakingly holy, passionately commited…
Without the OT – and in particular these stories of judgment – we can not have any idea how holy God is, or the depths to which people sink, or how important it is for the God of the Bible to deal with sin in a way that is fitting. We can not hope to understand the cross without it.
If we ditch the nasty bits we are ditching the holiness and justice of God. These stories are there to teach us that God is not tame – that he does things that shock us.
It is not our job to apologise for God’s behaviour.
God’s actions are explained in Romans 3.
19Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. 20Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.
21But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, 23for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— 26he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
Bizarrely, we culturally think that our treatment of the planet reaps just rewards – seeing causation in our actions – and occasionally predicting our own painful demise – but we will not afford God the same courtesy. Gary referenced the Day of the Triffids and this post from an Irish friend.
In the two episodes (which were rather a drag unfortunately), we got lots of warnings about what happens when you interfere with nature, namely that nature will eventually inflict its wrath on you. Come to think of it, this was a sort of Wrath of God story with nature standing in for God.
In fact in the last few years there have been several ‘Wrath of Nature’ movies; The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Day After Tomorrow to name but two. In both movies, and in this latest version of The Day of the Triffids, we are led to believe that we deserve what’s coming to us.
The funny thing is, no-one would ever make a movie these days about the Wrath of God in which the message also was that we had it coming to us. We’re able to accept that if we sin against nature we deserve our punishment, but not if we sin against nature’s maker.