The question has been raised many times. How could a loving God command entire people groups to be killed? And the declaration follows. “I could not love a God like that.”
Or how could a loving God send people to hell? And the declaration in response is, “I could not love a God who would do that.”
Many people would say no. And I cannot fault them for thinking this way. But if you will bear with my limited perspective, I think that we are not seeing a clear picture of who God is. We are not digging deeply enough to know His character.
I wonder how many of us have even heard that word used much today? Some religions have certain “holy days”, but I’m not talking about that type of holiness.
God’s holiness is the perfection of His character and His glory is so infinitely bright that sin can’t even abide in the same space. The Bible tells us that God cannot even look at sin. That sounds like it’s putting limitations on God but what it’s actually telling us is that He is so far removed from sin that sin cannot come into His presence. So when we, as sinners, think we want to engage God in a discussion, we must first have that sin issue dealt with.
That’s why God created the system of sacrifice in the Tabernacle and Temple of the Old Testament world. The sacrifice created a covering for the sins of the people. It is why the Jewish people today still celebrate the Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur.
If you look at the story in Genesis of how sin entered the world, you can see that sin broke God’s relationship with Adam and Eve. And though He was not taken by surprise, sin’s entrance into the equation in a sense (in purely human terms because God already knew what He would do) left God with a choice. As He had given Adam and Eve the choice to obey or disobey, so He had a choice whether to wipe them out and start over, or design a way to fix what sin had broken. To their great benefit, God decided to redeem, to fix what was broken.
So He made a promise to the woman. Thousands of years later He fulfilled that promise through the death of HIs Son on a wooden cross and miraculous resurrection from a garden tomb.
But as I’ve said before, there can be a long pause between “Ask” and “Receive” just as there was a long pause between the promise and it’s fulfillment. And there is another long pause between the rest of the promises and the fulfillment we still await.
But there comes a point when His patience wears out, so to speak. He told Noah that His Spirit would not always strive with men. He puts up with our evil inclinations, our penchant to sin only so long. And when sin reaches its capacity, He says, “Enough!”
In the Old Testament, He gave the law to the people of Israel. But even the peoples of other nations had a sense of right and wrong within them. We see this evidenced in people like Rahab and Ruth and Tamar (Judah’s Canaanite daughter-in-law) and certain other people who believed in Yahweh. God made provision for the “foreigner” in the law of Moses. He has always cared about all people. Israel was meant to be a light to foreign nations, though in the Old Testament they often became like those nations rather than show those nations how to worship as they did.
But let’s look at the question of vengeance. Israel, God’s chosen people, were captives in Egypt for over 400 years. During that time, the Canaanites lived in the land of Canaan where Abraham had once pitched his tent and purchased property. Then God led Israel out of Egypt and he told them to drive out the people of Canaan. Why? Why would God take away their land and give it to Israel? Why, in some cases, did God command whole cities to be destroyed?
Let’s go back to that holiness point and how God puts up with sin only so long. The Canaanite people worshipped gods like Molech and Chemosh. Both required child sacrifice. These man-made bronze images had arms stretched out and in the belly of the image a fire burned. They would place their children on the arms of the bronze statue and let them roll into the flames. Yeah. And we wonder about evil today?
These people also had temple prostitution going on as part of their “worship”. They were sexually immoral on many levels, they were violent, and later people like the Assyrians and even later than that the ancient Romans, had perfected the art of torture. Man’s inhumanity to man.
And we wonder why God sought vengeance against the evil of that day? We wonder why His patience with sin ran out?
God had shown them over 400 years of grace to repent. He had given the people of Noah’s day untold number years to repent and no one did. Very few did in Canaan.
Even Israel, God’s chosen people, were not spared when they sinned, just in case we think they were favored and allowed to get away with the sins of the peoples they were to drive out. Not so. Solomon worshiped false gods, so God split the kingdom in two. Later, Samaria’s sins caused them to have ten tribes taken captive and Judah eventually fell into captivity as well.
There are always consequences for sin because God cannot look upon it, or upon us when we are so filled with it we cannot even pray. I know it’s not popular to believe we are sinners, but ask yourself – do you have to teach a child to lie? To hit or demand its own way? To declare, “Mine!” even if a toy isn’t their’s? We are not born as blank slates, beloved. Eventually, our sinful nature will be evident. In some cases worse than others, but it will show itself. Guaranteed.
And so when sin ripened, so to speak, to a point where God said, “Enough!”, His holiness demanded vengeance. And people died.
That’s not a story we like to read, is it? Three words that used to be popular sermon topics are barely tolerated today: Sin, Hell, and Judgment.
But it is because He is Holy that God has to demand judgment for sin. But don’t you see that’s why His promise included a Savior? What kind of God would make a promise like that and then come Himself and fulfill it? What kind of God would look at your sin and mine and say, “I don’t want anyone to perish. So I will take their judgment upon myself?”
What kind of God would allow Himself to be tortured on a cruel Roman cross, die a horrible death, be flogged until his bones showed through, feel sharp thorns pierce every piece of skin around his head, have nails tear through his feet and hands or wrists and hang suspended, naked, unable to breath without excruciating pain, all because He didn’t want us to suffer separation from His glory? All because He wanted to preserve the relationship His holiness could not abide?
Do you think this God, this Savior is different than the God who first made the promise in the Garden? Not a chance, beloved. The same God who made the world, came into it to live among us just so He could restore what we had broken.
But that Old Testament God and those times of judgment and death that offends us today? They only came after hundreds of years of mercy. Of waiting patiently for some sign of us wanting a relationship with Him. But we, in our broken, sinful world, couldn’t reach up, so God reached down. We wanted to be like God. He came to be like men.
When we accuse God of injustice because His holiness demands payment for sin, when we think Him too vengeful and not loving enough, we forget what He offered. He has never wanted to show vengeance. That’s why He came to show mercy. He is the judge who would rather be tortured than send a single person to hell.
But if they/we would rather NOT have a relationship with Him, if we want our sins more than we want to turn from it and embrace His grace, then His holiness has to let us go. If we demand justice, that’s what He will give us.
It we request mercy, then He is ready and waiting with open, nail-scarred hands to receive us. But the choice is ours. The God who loves is also the Holy God who judges. We can’t forget that we deserve what Jesus took on our behalf. If we can’t see that? Then we will never see God for who He really is. But if we can see Him…
#toughquestions #whatkindofgodcouldyoulove
