“‘Percy, think,’ Chiron said. ‘You are
the son of the Sea God. Your father’s bitterest rival is Zeus, Lord of the Sky.
Your mother knew better than to trust you in an aeroplane. You would be in Zeus’
domain. You would never come down again.’
Overhead, lightning crackled. Thunder
boomed.”
Rick Riordan, Percy
Jackson and the Lightning Thief (2005)
 |
| Because, oddly enough, nothing says justice like a small wooden mallet and some obsolete measuring equipment. Thanks to JanPietruszka at freedigitalphotos.net. |
I have a problem with the judgey bits
of the Bible.
The fact is pretty obvious just from
the way my heart sinks when I turn to the passage for the day given by my Bible-in-five-years
reading plan and it starts with something like “The oracle concerning Tyre.
Wail, O ships of Tarshish, for Tyre is laid waste, without house or harbour!”1
Aw no, I think to myself, it’s a judgey one today. A similar
thing happens when I’m browsing the book of Psalms for something to help get me
into a correctly worshipful mood. My eyes alight on a promising-looking opening
verse or two – Psalm 9, say, which begins, “I will give thanks to the Lord with
my whole heart; I will recount all of your wonderful deeds. I will be glad and
exult in you; I will sing praise to your name, O Most High.” And I’m there
having a simply lovely time until I hit verse 3: “When my enemies turn back,
they stumble and perish before your presence.” Cue an awkward squirm on my part
– but it gets worse: “You have rebuked the nations; you have made the wicked
perish; you have blotted out their name for ever and ever. The enemy came to an
end in everlasting ruins; their cities you rooted out; the very memory of them
has perished.”2
Frankly, all this talk of people
perishing and having their name blotted out for ever and ever and coming to an
end in everlasting ruins makes me rather uncomfortable, especially because it’s
put across as a Good Thing: “For you have maintained my just cause; you have
sat on the throne, giving righteous judgement,” is the fourth verse of the
Psalm I quoted above, right in the midst of those judgey bits and, by syntax
and logic, pretty inextricable from them. It disconcerts me that I’m apparently
supposed to be on board with all this judgey stuff. The easiest thing to do is
to sort of skim over it. I don’t mean outright pretending it doesn’t exist, in
some sort of phenomenally extensive cut-and-paste job, but rather choosing to
place greater emphasis elsewhere. I don’t think I’m the only one given to such
tendencies, either: they seem pretty well rife among my fellow-believers. For
instance, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard read the first
seven verses of the ninth chapter of the book of Isaiah – that lovely
Christmassy bit about the people walking in darkness having seen a great light
and a child being born unto us and that – but I can’t recall any occasion of
corporate worship in which I encountered the chunk of verse that immediately
follows it, which is subheaded ‘The Lord’s Anger Against Israel’ in the NIV, ‘Judgement
on Arrogance and Oppression’ in the ESV. The chapter that began with a promise
of “no gloom for her who was in anguish” ends thus: “Through the wrath of the
Lord of hosts the land is scorched, and the people are like fuel for the fire;
no one spares another. They slice meat on the right, but are still hungry, and
they devour on the left, but are not satisfied; each devours the flesh of his
own arm, Manasseh devours Ephraim, and Ephraim devours Manasseh; together they
are against Judah. For all this his anger has not turned away, and his hand is
stretched out still.”3
Grim, right? But – and it’s a big but –
God does not allow space for me to be embarrassed about any of his
attributes. Including his anger.
“For whoever is ashamed of me and of my
words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the
glory of the Father and of the holy angels.” – Luke 9:26
This is serious stuff. Being ashamed of
the God I worship is a sin. Squirming uncomfortably at any of the
truths about him revealed in the Bible is symptomatic of the perverse and
pervasive corruption of my fallen, self-serving, evil-inclined, human heart,
and is to be condemned as such. Discrepancies between my personal feelings and
the truth of the Bible are rooted in the faults of the former, not the latter.
In actual fact, even a sort of neutral outlook on God’s wrath and judgement,
were such a thing possible, wouldn’t cut the mustard: if God is entirely
perfect and praiseworthy, then he is perfect and praiseworthy in all aspects,
which means his wrath too is perfect and praiseworthy. If I am to view God
rightly, therefore, I need to understand it as such. Which being so, I can
think of three good weapons with which to fight my embarrassment about the
judgey bits of the Bible.
1) God is just.
You’ve probably heard this one a
million times, but just think about it for a moment. Isn’t it the worst thing
ever when things aren’t fair? From being told off at primary school for
something someone else did to watching huge, multi-national companies go
unpunished for rampant tax evasion,4 doesn’t it just grate? Isn’t
it sickening to know that, right now, people are getting away with perpetrating
the vilest sorts of crimes against their fellow humans, and to be unable just
to charge in there and put things right? How glorious would it be, how satisfying,
how much of a relief, for someone to do that – entirely and perfectly to
restore every circumstance to a state of total justice, no short change or soft
sentences involved?
Let’s revisit Psalm 9: “But the Lord
sits enthroned for ever; he has established his throne for justice, and he
judges the world with righteousness; he judges the peoples with uprightness.
The Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble …
the Lord has made himself known; he has executed judgement; the wicked are
snared in the work of their own hands.”
God as judge not only has the power to
subject every part of his creation to judgement, but also the inscrutable moral
authority. God’s judgements are right and fitting; they are just, by
definition: he sets the standard. There’s no wriggling out of God’s judgement,
nor does he play favourites: this is not the kind of judge, for instance, to
draw an example from a recent news story, who will recommend that a rapist be
given a lighter sentence because said rapist happens to be really good at
competitive swimming.5
That aching longing we feel for justice
to be done is just one strand of the groaning of all creation as it waits for
everything to be put right. God’s ultimate judgement hasn’t been enacted yet,
but he is not deaf to the cries of the oppressed. Justice will come. When it
does, it will be perfect. And the judgey bits of the Bible testify to the fact.
2) Sin’s days are numbered.
So the enacting of God’s ultimate
judgement will, when it comes, put everything right, which is necessary
because, currently, an awful lot of things are really rather wrong, and that’s
down to a little something that, in Christianese, we like to call ‘sin’ –
essentially, not doing things God’s way, which is a problem because, as we’ve
seen, God’s way of doing things is entirely right and fair and just, and so any
move away from it is a step in the direction of wrongness and evil and
injustice. So whenever God expresses anger against someone in the Bible, it’s
because that person has done such wrong as warrants it. God is not some petty,
capricious deity whose fondness for smiting people is totally disproportionate
to their deservedness to be smitten (as per my opening quotation); if his judgement
seems overly harsh to me, that’s because I don’t understand how grave a problem
sin really is. Sin is, after all, responsible for every single one of the
injustices at which I was busy feeling utterly sickened a few paragraphs ago.
Plus, sin is rampant in my own heart.
The more I see of what God is like, the more it becomes clear to me how corrupt
I am in comparison. I can, in fact, barely breathe without entertaining
some sinful inclination or other, and fighting that, in accordance with what I
am commanded to do as a follower of Jesus,6 can be very dejecting.
There just seems no end to it. The same old sins rear their ugly heads again
and again: I give in, I repent, I give in, I repent, I give in, and it
sometimes seems as if it will never get any better. One might easily start to
wonder exactly what the point is anyway.
But that same ultimate judgement I was
just talking about spells the end for sin. Perfect justice means that not only
the symptoms of the disease will be done away with, but its root cause. It is
impossible for sin – wrongness – to have a place in the perfect new creation
that will result from God putting everything right. “Nothing impure will ever
enter [the Holy City, the new Jerusalem], nor will anyone who does what is
shameful or deceitful.” – Revelation 21:27
That means I can be encouraged that every
effort I put into fighting sin is an effort for the winning side; such efforts,
in other words, are guaranteed to come to full fruition. And it means I needn’t
despair when I do give in to sin (as happens with quite phenomenal frequency),
because I have been promised that it won’t keep happening forever. God refuses
to put up with sin indefinitely, and the judgey bits of the Bible proclaim that
zero-tolerance policy.
3) What happened at the cross was a
HUGE deal.
There’s currently a bit of a
discrepancy between my first two points. On the one hand, God is perfectly just
and won’t allow anyone to wriggle out of facing his judgement. On the other, I
am thoroughly riddled with sin and deserving of punishment. Things do not, thus
far, look as if they are going to be particularly rosy for me when final
judgement arrives.
Enter my third point. Another
well-known chunk of Isaiah will be useful here:
“But he was wounded for our
transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his
stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray; we
have turned – every one – to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him the
iniquity of us all …
Yet it was the will of the Lord to
crush him; he has put him to grief;
when his soul makes an offering for
guilt,
he shall see his offspring; he shall
prolong his days;
the will of the Lord shall prosper in
his hand.
Out of the anguish of his soul he shall
see and be satisfied;
by his knowledge shall the righteous
one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their
iniquities.”7
It’s a prophecy about Jesus, and it’s
really driving home the point (emphasis mine, of course). Jesus took the blame
for our sins. He took the punishment we deserved, so that God could declare us
righteous and perfect and worthy of his new creation without compromising on
his perfect justice. God is just; sin’s days are numbered; and Jesus willingly
paid for our sins so that our days don’t have to be numbered to match.
On this account, that
same brutal intensity of God’s judgement that was earlier making me so uncomfortable
is rendered utterly glorious. The first thing to learn was that sin is, to
warrant such judgement, far worse than I ever realised. The second is that God’s
love for me, to enact such judgement on his adored Son, must reach far more
extravagant depths than I ever realised. If I skim over the issue of God’s
judgement, if I try to tone it down or pass it off as no big deal, I actually
end up undercutting the very qualities of love and mercy whose place among God’s
attributes I was trying thereby to preserve. If judgement were no big deal, it
would therefore have been no big deal for Jesus to undergo it for my sake, and
the love demonstrated in the act would have been pretty minimal. As it is, by
contrast, I can look at the cross, consider how absolutely horrific a thing it
was for Jesus to undergo the judgement I deserved, and never, ever doubt that
God must really, really love me to have carried out a plan like that.
So there you go: three
ways to harness discomfort with the judgey bits of the Bible in order to praise
God even more wholeheartedly. The judgey bits declare God’s perfect,
unflinching justice; they expose the severity of sin even as they promise an
end to it; and they bear witness to God’s infinite love and mercy in
reconciling these two the way he did, pouring out judgement on Jesus, who was
sinless, so that we who are sinful might join him in the perfectly right and
just world to come.
Thank God for the judgey
bits.
Footnotes
1 That’s Isaiah 23, which I read on
Friday 27th May. As you may recall from my January post ‘That Kind
of Woman’ if you have an especially good memory, I stole the plan I’m using
from the website of some church or other: http://southvalleychurch.com.au/5-year-bible-reading-plan/.
It’s going well so far. Can recommend.
2 And here’s the whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+9&version=ESVUK.
3 See for yourself: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+9&version=ESVUK.
4 The creators of BBC Three programme The
Revolution Will Be Televised have come up with some rather entertaining
ways to respond to tax evasion. Among the companies they’ve taken on are
Amazon, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuaUD_2phlg,
and Google, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJPuUNN96PU.
5 I rather annoyingly appear to have misplaced
the relevant article. I’ll endeavour to find it, but if any of you lovely
readers are familiar with the story and either have a link I could use or can
remember some specific details that might make my search-engine-based quest
more efficient, do let me know.
6 Take Colossians 3, for instance: “Put
to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity,
passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these
the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living
in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and
obscene talk from your mouth.” https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=colossians+3&version=ESVUK.
7 Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+53&version=ESVUK.
Go on; it’s an absolutely brilliant one. Really, I’m spoiling you.
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