THE SEVERITY AND GOODNESS OF GOD

Joshua 6:20&21 “When the trumpets sounded, the people shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the people gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so every man charged straight in, and they took the city. They devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it - men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.”

I want to preach to you in the next few weeks on the sin and judgment of a man called Achan in the seventh chapter of Joshua. I have been thinking about this for some time and I want to begin by giving you the reasons for preaching on this theme.

1. THE CHURCH NEEDS TO HEAR OF THE JUDGMENTS OF GOD IN THE OLD TESTAMENT.

i] We once had a church member whose name was Dorothy. She lived in a pretty cottage out in Cwm Rheidol. She had been a nurse for forty years and then there came a time in her life when she was no longer well enough to attend church and I regularly visited her. On one occasion she told me that she had been reading the Old Testament and had been troubled by the accounts of God commanding his people to destroy entire nations. “They seem to be so blood-thirsty and cruel,” she said. “How can you reconcile such passages to the command of Jesus in the New Testament to love your enemies?” That was her problem, and I have no reason to believe that it was a trick question, or an excuse for not believing the Bible. She could have been referring to the text before us or to other such occasions when God intended to clear away the Canaanite peoples ordering their entire destruction. Let me direct your attention to three of those passages:

A) Exodus 23:20-24 “See, I am sending an angel ahead of you to guard you along the way and to bring you to the place I have prepared. Pay attention to him and listen to what he says. Do not rebel against him; he will not forgive your rebellion, since my Name is in him. If you listen carefully to what he says and do all that I say, I will be an enemy to your enemies and will oppose those who oppose you. My angel will go ahead of you and bring you into the land of the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hivites and Jebusites, and I will wipe them out. Do not bow down before their gods or worship them or follow their practices. You must demolish them and break their sacred stones to pieces.”

B) Deuteronomy 7:1-5 “When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations - the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you - and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods, and the LORD's anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire.”

C) Deuteronomy 20 16-18 “In the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them - the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites - as the LORD your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshipping their gods, and you will sin against the LORD your God.”

Dorothy was asking how it could be possible to reconcile such statements with the love of God displayed in the life and teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ? I tried to answer her then and also people today who are also perplexed. That is one purpose of this brief series of messages.

ii] These are familiar passages quoted by people who reject the truthfulness of the Old Testament. They may say that they cannot accept the infallibility of the Bible because of such violence. I remember over 45 years ago speaking to the area superintendent of the Baptist Union in South Wales. He scorned the inerrancy of Scripture, favourably repeating the words of a former principal of Regent Park College Oxford who stated, “I don’t believe in an infallible pope, and I don’t believe in an infallible Bible.” That was his position too. Certainly you would find it very difficult to get from the Lord Jesus the doctrine that the head of the papacy speaks infallibly, but there is no doubt that the Lord Jesus believed that Scripture could not be broken, and what it said God said. He often quoted from this book of Deuteronomy (that I have just quoted from twice), and Jesus prefaced his quotations with the words, “It is written.” In other words, the destruction of the Cannanites was not a shrewdly calculated policy of racial genocide devised by Moses. The initiative came from Jehovah not from man. The infallible Saviour presents us with an infallible Bible. But that area superintendant would have none of this. He quoted from the concluding verse of Psalm 137, “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones” (Ps. 137:9). “How can you believe that is the word of God?” he asked and had little time for my attempts to explain. He wouldn’t heed my claims that there are no ungodly prayers in the book of psalms. That prayer speaks of the time when all God’s enemies will be destroyed from the smallest to the greatest and of our determination to be involved in that divine vindication of the Christ and experience the blessedness of that. Let me return to this psalm in a moment.

So the word of God is under attack and my calling is to defend the truth, just as the great tigers of India today need to be defended against poachers with rifles. Of course we must do what Spurgeon advocated and testify to the word of God – let the lion out of its cage. True. But we are faced with modernists boxing in and slaughtering the living Bible verse by verse and chapter by chapter. We have a duty to stand up for all the Scriptures.

iii] We Christians are being placed in some difficulty by those followers of militant Islam who have virtually declared war on the western world. In the name of Allah and quoting the Koran they find justification for slaughtering many anonymous people going about their business without offending anyone. To find a Christian who believes that God actually gave a commandment to the children of Israel during the Old Testament dispensation to wipe out everyone in the city of Jericho seems to identify us with a similar bunch of merciless fundamentalists; we become indistinguishable from Islamic terrorists in their eyes. So we need to show the absolute key difference between the Bible and the Koran on our attitudes to our enemies.

iv] I have been reading some useful books on this theme such as John W. Wenham’s The Goodness of God (IVP, 1974), James Adams’ War Songs of the Prince of Peace (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1991), Derek Kidner’s Hard Sayings (IVP, 1973), D.E.Hart-Davies’ The Severity of God (Pickering and Inglis, 1943 and reprinted Quinta Press 2003), Peter Masters’ Joshua’s Conquest (Wakeman Trust, 2005), and Joel Nederhood’s sermon, The Dark Side of the Bible (Back to God Hour, November 1977). Other men have faced up to this theme and written helpfully about it and I must share the fruit of their labours with you.

v] It is for our blessing that we study any part of the Scriptures. As Paul writes, “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Romans 15:4). I would not like to be in a congregation whose minister neglected any part of the Bible, or failed to bring the full impact of its teaching to bear on the life of any individual or on the congregation as a whole. That is why God breathed out these teachings, that we might have more endurance, courage and hope

vi] I think the particular sin of Achan and the judgment it brought on the whole assembly of the people of God drives us all to examine our hearts and ask whether there is something in us that is bringing weakness and failure into our midst.

2. GOD HAD WAITED PATIENTLY BEFORE HIS JUDGMENTS CAME ON THE  CANAANITES.

How do we respond to God wiping out the Canaanites? Well, let me begin by saying that there is no way that we can solve this problem completely. I dare not allow my imagination to dwell on the scene of a bloodthirsty army entering and plundering a city and killing all its inhabitants. Anyone who tells you that he has a neat theology that is able to reconcile these dark episodes with the message we have about the immeasurable love of God is not tell­ing you the truth. We must read the Bible. We must believe the entire Bible as Jesus himself did, but when we do, we must be prepared to have days when we are sobered by what we read. There is no total answer, and the reason there is no answer which is fully satis­fying is that we are little people, our viewpoint is considerably more limited than God’s, and our own minds have been misted over by the effect of sin in our lives. There surely is an answer to our problem in the heart of God - he knows the whole answer; we don’t, nor can we. But there are several things we can think about that will enable us to handle the consternation and terror that could make us despair when we read the dark parts of the Bible.

Something that helped the Christian Reformed preacher Dr Joel Nederhood come to understand the meaning of these passages is a small part of a sentence in the book of Genesis, where we find the record of a conversation God had with Abraham who became the father of the nation of Israel. It was Abraham’s children who later were to en­ter the land of Canaan - the land which we now know as the country of Israel – where these descendants of his, on God’s orders, completely destroyed many of the people. Now accord­ing to what we find in Genesis 15, God talked to Abraham at the time when the patriarch himself was travelling through this very land that his children would later conquer. This is what the Bible says about God’s conversation with him: “Then the LORD said to him, ‘Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and ill-treated four hundred years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterwards they will come out with great possessions. You, however, will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a good old age. In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.’” (Genesis 15:13-16).

Now, that small phrase, “for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure” says something very helpful when we think of the destruction of the Amorites. The Amorites, I might say, were the people who lived in the land of Canaan and who were later destroyed by Abraham’s descendants. There was a single tribe of people who carried that name, but the name ‘Amorites’ was also used for all those who lived in Canaan. They had established a large empire about 400 years before Abraham, and they dominated the world in which he lived. Notice, then, that God said that a day would come - 400 years after Abraham - when Abraham’s descendants would take over the land, but they had to wait that long time - many, many decades of depravity - because the Amorites weren’t yet ripe for punishment. When they did become ripe for punishment, when the measure of their wickedness was full, when no voice of conscience or influence from godly people living nearby had any impact on them at all, it was then that God could no longer withhold his judgment. The instrument that Jehovah used to destroy these evil people was the people of God. They became the sword of the executioner in his hand.

What this means is that when we read of terrify­ing destruction, sometimes of entire cities or even nations as the children of Israel entered the land of Canaan, we shouldn’t think that this judgment of God in a totally unexpected way fell down from the sky and wantonly destroyed ordinary folk without a cause. No. The destruction of God came upon these nations after they had continued to plunge deeper and deeper into sinfulness. The abominations that were expressed within these na­tions were beyond description. They were nations in which murder was committed wantonly. They practiced infanticide, the sacrifice of children throwing babies into the fires, casting teenage boys into the red-hot arms of idols, and obnoxious sexual perversions. They were degrading and debasing practices backed by ruthless power. When the Israelites refused to destroy them they became corrupted by them. Hear the lament of the psalmist; “They did not destroy the peoples as the LORD had commanded them, but they mingled with the nations and adopted their customs. They worshipped their idols, which became a snare to them. They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to demons. They shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan, and the land was desecrated by their blood. They defiled themselves by what they did; by their deeds they prostituted themselves” (Ps. 106:34-39). They were nations that openly and continuously defied the God in whom they lived and moved and had their being. So here were a people who for centuries had defied God by their inhuman cruelty and abominations and all this time God was patient restraining his hand.

3. GOD’S FIRST CONCERN WAS FOR THE NATIONS TO REPENT AND TURN TO HIM.

That is the theme of the book of Jonah, and whenever we think of God’s destruction of wicked people, we should always view that as his very last response to their defiance; judgment is his final and ultimate reaction to their continued refusal to repent. If you are familiar with the book of Jonah, you know that it contains the record of a stubborn prophet whom God told to go to the city of Nineveh and tell them to re­pent. He didn’t want to go because Nineveh was an enemy of Jonah’s nation. They had done Jonah and his family and friends much harm, and at the end of the book, Jonah complained to God for sparing the city after it had repented. The Lord said to him, “You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?" (Jonah 4:10&11). God had responded to the comprehensive repentance of the city of Nineveh, from the king on his throne to the beggar lying in the gutter. He pitied that humbled city. However, when a city, a nation, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, continuously lives in rebellion against Almighty God, finally his judgment will fall on it. But that judgment is not indiscriminate and unjust.

There was mercy for Noah and his family, and mercy for Lot and his daughters. Consider again a prostitute named Rahab living in the city of Jericho. She had heard of this great LORD of Israel and the mighty miracles he had done in delivering his people from their enemies. She said to some of their representatives, “When we heard of it, our hearts sank and everyone's courage failed because of you, for the LORD your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below” (Josh. 2:11). She feared the Lord and so she and her family were spared when the city of Jericho was destroyed and its people put to the sword. God does not punish the innocent with the guilty. You remember that assurance is given to Abraham when he intercedes for Sodom, and asks God if there are just a few righteous people in the city would he destroy the entire city. God says that if there are ten godly people in the place then the whole city will be spared. That is Jehovah of the Old Testament, a God of grace, abounding in mercy for the sake of the righteous. That is the God of the New Testament too, abounding in mercy to a groaning world for the sake of the righteous Son of God.

There is evidence that the kings of Israel had a reputation for fairness and mercy at times of war (2 Kings 20:31). Their soldiers showed restraint; there was no scorched earth tactics. Before a city was besieged it was offered peace conditions. If a city refused and had to be taken by hand to hand fighting still the children were not to be put to the sword (Deuteronomy 20:13). When prisoners were taken it was unthinkable that they be put to death (2 Kings 6:22).

Remember this when you read those dark parts of the Bible which describe the judgment of God falling on nations such as those which were de­stroyed by the people of Israel when they came into the promised land. This destruction did not occur suddenly; it was God’s reaction to cen­turies-long rejection of righteousness. This destruction did not occur indiscriminately; God spared the guiltless and repentant.

4. GOD IS A GOD WHO JUDGES, AND ALL HIS JUDGMENTS ARE JUST.

The history of the exterminations we find in the Bible began with God, not man. The first two on record, and by far the greatest, were Noah’s Flood and the overthrow of Sodom. God planned them not Noah and not Abraham. Both of these are depicted as judgments on moral decadence, not unlike the judgments on the Canaanites. There is no room for the idea that Israel at war was simply confusing its own nationalistic zeal and determination to survive for the will of God, whose mercy ‘would never have allowed wholesale slaughter.’ No. People might argue, “Ah, Scripture itself had misread two meaningless catastrophes as divine judgments.” No. That view quarrels with the New Testament as well as the Old. It denies the reality of providence. God would be re­duced to watching the unfortunate aberrations of nature and en­deavouring to make the best of them. No. The Old Testa­ment is self-consistent; it presents a sovereign and just God whose acts of salvation and judgment may take human lives by fire or flood, by pestilence or the sword, by the Red Sea or by ‘a bow at a venture’, just as he pleases.

We are so calloused by sin that we tend to laugh at it and joke about it. Why, we even glorify it by turning it into entertainment; we turn lust into something that will sell underwear and cars and whisky. The very conduct openly featured in certain television programmes are the sins that finally bring on us the judgment of the Almighty God. So this is something to think about when we read through the dark parts of the Bible. When we read of the destruction of entire people, we must remember that such destruction comes after many, many years of persisting in sin, that the judgments are fair and discriminatory; they are the just response of a sin-hating God.

The dark side of the Bible is real, and it frightens those who take the whole Bible seriously. We have seen that God’s statement to Abraham about how he would hold off bringing his people into the land of the Amorites because they were not yet ready for judgment. Then what will he do when they are ripe for justice? So you ask what is God doing in Wales today? He is judging us and he is also restraining his judgments because he is giving us time to repent. From the Bible we know that God’s judg­ment finally falls on people and on nations, only after a long and dreary plunge into sinfulness.

Consider this inspired psalm again; “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones” (Ps. 137:9). What can we say about that prayer?

i] It is an expression of horror at such an act. No other literature from the nations of the world at that time contains a scream of anguish at such dreadful actions, except this psalm. In every other nation such occurrences in war were taken for granted.

ii] The words are a mirror of what has been done to the people of God. As the previous verses says, “O Daughter of Babylon doomed to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us” (v.8). When a heathen besieging army finally overcame the resistance and entered a town it was to slaughter everyone and dash the children to the ground. Babylon had been in no mood for restraint when it finally breached the walls of Jerusalem and took the city.  What do the perpetrators of such acts deserve? Their punishment must fit the crime, that degree of pain that they imposed on others. God will render to every man according to his works. So with the unspeaking cruelties done to three Christians in Turkey weeks ago, the multiple stabbings, the disemboweling, the cutting of the throats so deeply that they heads were almost removed from their bodies, the other men forced to watch their friends being killed like this awaiting their turn for the horror, and the videoing of the whole brutality, and all this done by young men in the name of religion! We long for justice to be done and the blood of these godly men vindicated.

iii] This psalm is a poem and so it comes with all the force of poetic white-hot longing for vindication. No doubt if the writer were speaking about crime and punishment at a table during dinner his language would be different, but his sentiments and conviction would be just the same. Derek Kidner urges us to distil the essence of these words, and to receive the impact of this raw wound. Don’t speak smooth words in the face of such cruelty, but also see it in the light of the cross where to the need for justice is added a longing for the salvation for the most tyrannical of torturers and murderers. Those words are an impassioned protest against all comfortable views of human wickedness, the judgment is deserves, and the legacy it leaves, and the enmity and bitterness it has created that has to be laid to rest in some costly and just ways.

iv] Alec Motyer asks, “Do you stop to consider what we are asking when we pray for the return of the Lord Jesus? Probably we do not couch our prayer in the following terms: In flaming fire take vengeance on those who know not God and obey not the gospel; give them their due, even eternal destruction from Thy face. But, according to 2 Thessalonians 1:8, these things are inseparable for the coming, and therefore by implication, if not explicitly, we are asking for them . . . It seems to be exactly the element of realism which is absent from our prayers, and which gives us such offense in the prayers of the psalms . . . In Ephesians 4:26 Paul does not forbid the Christians to be angry; he commands a harder thing: that the Christian should be sinlessly angry. This is an emotion which is rarely felt – if ever – and it is for this reason that we fail to understand it when we find it in the psalms” (quoted in The Goodness of God, John Wenham, IVP, p.168).

5. THE NEW TESTAMENT ACCEPTS THE OLD TESTAMENT’S VIEW OF THESE EVENTS.

The Flood, the fall of Sodom, the wilderness judg­ments, the captivity, are all seen as straightforward divine punish­ments. War is no exception. So far from treating the destruction of the Canaanites as excess cruelty, Paul sum­marizes it as the work of God, God “bore with them in the wilderness,” says the apostle, “and when he had destroyed seven nations in the land of Canaan, he gave them their land as an inheritance” (Acts 13: 18). There is no trace of embarrassment about those events. There is no tension as there is in the Sermon on the Mount between Jesus and the Pharisees – “You have heard men (that is, the Pharisees) say so and so, but I say unto you.” Nothing like that. Jesus refers to the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorra and the destruction of the world at the flood. Hebrews chapter 11 summons a string of warriors to join the patriarchs and martyrs, men whose exploits were in battle: “who through faith conquered king­doms . . . became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight” (Heb. 11: 32-34).

In other words, God’s judgments must be read as a part of the entire Bible. We must always deal with the dark, forbidding, threatening elements in the Bible in terms of the entire Bible. We must not allow them to stand alone. We mustn’t let our understanding of God’s nature, for example, to be determined solely by what we read about the punishment that comes upon God’s enemies. So far as the nature of God is concerned, the great revelation which comes to meet us when we read the entire Bible is that God is love. Now, this is a fact, found for example in I John which says: “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love” (4:7, 8). Now, I say, if the parts of the Bible that deal with judgment and destruction are the dark passages, then the elements of the Bible that reveal that God is love are the bright parts. We may never let the dark parts of the Bible stand alone; we may never allow them to play over our consciousness all by themselves. If we allow this to happen, we can be driven to despair; we can be driven insane. So then, we must never allow the dark parts of the Bible to cancel out the brilliantly lit parts. There is no contradiction between a loving man hating the sight of a little boy being abused and in his duty as a local magistrate punishing the man. That is perfectly understandable and necessary.

At the same time the great message of God’s judgment implies that the love of God is something different from the simple, sweet’n’weak forms of love that we often encounter among ourselves. The fact that God is love is the great, dominant idea that we must never forget, but we must remember, too, that the love of God is expressed along the path of jus­tice and judgment. That ‘God is love’ does not mean that his justice will go unsatisfied. God is love indeed, but those who persistently sink lower into sin and express ever more mightily their re­bellion against him will most certainly receive the just reward of their rejection of God’s love.

When we read the New Testament do we meet the judgment of God? Does Jesus speak of it in the Sermon on the Mount? Does the Lord Christ speak of judgment in the most graphic words? Does he speak of it more than anyone else in the Bible? Yes he does. He underlines the warnings of Moses and the prophets that God finally punishes those who reject him, and this underscores the terrible nature of sin.

6. THESE JUDGMENTS ARE THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME.

They are not models for how we should act today, to organize a crusade against other religions and so on. Our Lord viewed them not as ‘old, unhappy, far-off things’, best forgotten, confined to the Old Testament and to a tribal god long superseded. In the human story, disasters and wars continue to the end. As it had been in the days of Noah, so it would be in the end; for the Old Testament gives us just a foretaste of what we are meeting today; the full reality lay ahead of Abraham and Moses and Joshua. There was a time when Jesus was challenged about accidents and brutality but he refused to moralize or philosophize on the human violence or the disasters of his day. He saw them not as problems but as signs of a world ready to perish, and as a summons to those who listened to him to repent (Lk. 13: 1-5). So he was speaking as the prophets had spoken of the Day of the Lord, which they discerned looming up as the great reality behind their contemporary war-clouds, locust-swarms or earth­quakes.

God’s final judgment is certainly going to correct the rough justice of history. This is a strong theme of our Lord’s teaching. ‘It shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you’; ‘more tolerable . . . for the land of Sodom than for you’. ‘The men of Nineveh will arise at the judgment with this gener­ation and condemn it’ (Mt. 11: 22, 24; 12: 41). A day of vindication is coming. Today rich crooks destroy the lives of millions, and they get away with it, and get fat on their wickedness. It will not be so for ever. They are facing their end too, though they mock it. The Judge of all the earth must do right.

7. THE CHURCH’S WEAPONS ARE SPIRITUAL.

They are not the molotov cocktail or the suicide bomber. They are the sword of the spirit and the breastplate of righteousness. This is an inescapable New Testament emphasis. Why was it different during the Old Testament dispensation? Because Israel was both church and state, and the state’s weapons are physical weapons. We all know that the inward strength of a state is moral, for ‘righteousness exalts a nation.’ What Hitler and Mao and Mugabe have done with their policies has been immoral. A state must act in a just and moral way, but the will of the state must also be enforceable. The proper task of its officers, its police and soldiers and magistrates, is to promote justice and order, both by immaterial means — ‘to praise those who do right’ — and by physical sanctions — ‘to punish those who do wrong.’ These sanctions include ‘the sword.’ It would seem crazy to suppose that God intends the sword to be drawn against the enemy within – the murderer and the rapist - but sheath it against the invader. Such a view would make a rift between the Old Testament and the New at a point where, as we have seen, the New makes no disparagement of the Old. The New Testament approves of Israel’s wars and warriors as much as it approves of the Old Testament’s vision of a world finally at peace.

Today we do not live in a theocracy, but Muslims think they do and that we should. We Christians make a distinction between crimes - which are punishable by the state, and sins - which are not. There is today for us this crucial distinction between church and the state, and the utter contrast between the preaching the Bible which is our weapon, and guns which are the weapons of the state. The Christian has a duty to both, and he cannot cut the knot by denying either of them. But Scripture, in both Testaments, encourages us to grapple with this duality and see both extremes of it within God’s single grasp. God’s deepest work has always been done by the testimony of the word, by potential martyrs, the prophets and apostles. They were ready to die for the truth they spoke, but they didn’t deny the force of arms in its proper sphere. In Romans chapter eight is the love of God keeping his people. In Romans chapter 13 we meet the state and its sword defending us from criminals. They are our wives and children’s protection from the thug and the abuser and the thief. We believe in the bobby on his beat. The police and army are a country’s answer to its enemies. In Hebrews 11 there are the martyrdoms of the faithful and also the exploits of the warriors, and that is the proper setting for the gospel. The vineyard of the Lord required the rough work of clearing, fencing and guarding, no less than the subtler arts of the vinedresser; it was ultimately a single operation under the one landowner, and the Old Testament helps us to see it so.

8. THOSE WHO TURN FROM SIN AND BELIEVE ON CHRIST WILL BE SAFE.

We must look into the face of the Lord Jesus Christ. The God who makes us tremble as we read the reports of his fury, is the Father who poured out that fury on his only begotten Son, Jesus who took it lovingly, and now, in Jesus he offers us all eternal salvation; forgiveness because Christ suffered and died; no forgiveness without his pain. When the iniquity of the ancient Amorites was full, God sent his thundering armies among them and de­stroyed them. When our iniquity is full, the same will happen to us, a fearful waiting for divine judgment . . . unless . . . unless we repent of our sins and turn to Jesus.

The dark side of the Bible has this great purpose: it is designed to make us cry out for mercy and flee to Jesus for our salvation. At the cross Jesus took the full strength of God’s wrath and satisfied his justice eternally. Those who believe in him can be saved.

I, with you, am troubled by the dark side of the Bible, and as I read its pages, there are days when I am saddened by the spectacle of judgment that I cannot understand. I tremble as I marvel at the mystery of God’s great being. We are at his mercy. We must fear him. And we must believe in his Son. Then we will be rescued. Do that, and be saved.

8^th July 2007   GEOFF THOMAS