Who gets comforted by judgement and wrath?

I read a blog post from The Pilgrim Penguin that links the judgement of God to the problem of evil.

In it she says

Most arguments for atheism, including one I heard recently from Peter Singer, revolve around unjust human suffering: if God cares about us, why does He allow so much suffering without intervening? Either God doesn't exist, or God is bad.

One facet of a response to this question is to consider the judgement of God.

This set me thinking about who will get comforted by the notion of God's judgement and wrath.

It is counter-intuitive to think of the judgement and wrath of God as a comforting idea. But those who suffer now cry out to God for his help and his justice. In Revelation 6, this call for justice continues even beyond death! In this passage, those who are martyred for the faith ask God to bring his judgement, and soon:

9 When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne. 10 They cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” 11 Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been.

Although Revelation 6 is written for all Christians, there will be a special group who should read it and draw particular comfort. They are the people mentioned in verse 11, the "fellow servants and their brothers" of those who have already suffered martyrdom, who are about to suffer in exactly the same way. If you were about to die for your faith, and to die in the most painful and excruciating way, the reminder of coming judgement would be the most wonderful comfort. All will be put right by our mighty avenging judge, the lamb on God's throne who is also the Lion of Judah.

If the thinking behind Revelation 6 is right (and how dare we suggest otherwise), the doctrine of coming judgement ought to be preached with greater severity to those who need comfort and feel abandoned by God. We must never, never, tone down the horror of God's wrath; in doing so we take away the comfort and encouragement of those who feel that God is a long way away.

Fired up about hell

I seem to have gotten a bit carried away with this topic. Blog readers who've joined up in the last little while could be forgiven for thinking that it's a regular subject. But it's really only featured in posts during the last two weeks or so. Who knows what the future holds? But for the moment, if you want to review some of the ground covered, you can go to the following:

1. Politeness and hell

2. Taxidrivers and hell

3. Preaching hell

4. Preaching judgement

5. Do we preach hell too much?

6. Hell: a help for depression

7. Did Jesus preach judgement to all Israel?

8. Broughton Knox on judgement and contextualization

9. Who gets comforted by judgement and wrath?

Broughton Knox on judgement and contextualization

The message of the New Testament:

The New Testament message is a message about the judgement of God on every individual and over every human institution.

-"World evangelism", in D. Broughton Knox, Selected Works Vol II, p 225.

The message of God's judgement is the message which Christians are commissioned to proclaim. It is a very practical and a very pressing message, but within this message there is a word of grace and hope, for the judge is also the saviour...

The message of God's judgement is a very relevant message. It is the point of contact with the hearer, for whatever the culture barrier between the messenger and hearer, both have this common ground; they know the guilt of sin. This is a universal human experience, and it is at this point that the gospel message becomes relevant. For within the message of judgement there is also the message of the victory that Christ has won over sin, so that all who call upon his name as their Lord receive remission of sin and are no longer under judgement but have passed out of death into life. They are accepted by God as his sons and daughters, and stand before him in his favour.

-ibid. p. 226

Broughton says more about judgement and contextualization in other places:

A gospel which contains judgement as a prominent strand as does the New Testament gospel, is relevant to men and women everywhere and in every age and culture. It does not need indigenization [that is, contextualization], so popular a catchword today, but requires only clarity of language and faithfulness in proclamation. The sense of right and wrong is universal in the human race and so is the knowledge that we fall below our own standards of what is right, and that this entails death.

Thus the gospel that contains judgement, and salvation from judgement, is a gospel that is always relevant to the hearer, no matter to what stage of civilization he may have attained. Such a gospel does not need to be assimilated to the culture of the people who are hearing it.

A theology that proclaims the God who saves from judgement by forgiveness through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ does not need to be adapted for Australian audiences, or to be turned into a black theology for the blacks of North America. Asian Christians and Western Christians need the same gospel and the same theology which is based on it, and all are able to understand it, no matter how different the cultural backgrounds of the hearers and preachers may be, so long as the proclamation is true to the New Testament gospel of judgement and salvation from judgement.

-Broughton Knox, "The Everlasting God" in Selected Works Volume I, p. 60

Australian, African—American, Asian, Western. We may as well add young, old, teenagers, men, and women. Or with Paul: 'Jew, Greek, slave, free, male, female' (Gal 3:28)

Did Jesus preach judgement to all Israel?

Well, he preached a lot more than that! His was a message of grace and salvation; so much so that he (or John, it is a little bit hard to work it out) could say "For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." (John 3:17)

Not that judgement and grace are ever separated in Jesus' message. The very next verse of John's account makes that plain: "Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God." (John 3:18)

Now all of this is by way of getting back to this post, where I suggested that Jesus preached judgement in the clearest and starkest possible terms. And that he did this not only to the smug religious people but to the whole of Israel, as he instructed 72 of his disciples to take such a message right through the towns and villages of the nation. Speaking to his disciples, he set matters out without any hint of ambiguity:

I tell you, it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom than for that town.

-Luke 10:12.

Lurid as this warning was, we might ask ourselves whether the 72 disciples, when they went out, were as harsh as Jesus himself when they actually spoke to the people of Israel?

After all, Jesus' words about Sodom were not addressed to the villages themselves, but could almost be read as an aside to the disciples.

We don't have any direct evidence on this question, since the actual preaching of the 72 on this mission is not recorded.

But we do have one reliable judge regarding what was preached, and that is the Lord Jesus himself.

With this in mind, we note that whatever asides Jesus may have made to his disciples about Sodom, the very next words he speaks are addressed not to the disciples but to the villages that they will be visiting

though they still form part of his briefing session for the 72, and so are meant to be heard by them.

They likewise are words of judgement:

13Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. 14 But it will be more bearable in the judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you. 15 And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You shall be brought down to Hades.

and they continue the thought that Jesus has begun by his mention of Sodom

and indeed, by his mention of what the disciples ought to do if the message they preach is not received.

Not only this, but Jesus' response on their return

"I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven", Luke 10:18

indicates satisfaction over the way they've fulfilled their commission, showing that they passed on the message exactly as they heard it. We don't have any reason at all to think that the disciples as they preached their way through Israel watered down their message, or the horrifying terms in which it was stated by their Lord.

Not that we need to doubt that the disciples themselves were fired up to deliver a message of judgement on their master's behalf. Immediately before this mission, James and John, foaming at the mouth over Samaria's rejection of Jesus, have asked Jesus:“Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" (Luke 9:54). No wonder Jesus called them Sons of Thunder!

Jesus on that occasion tones them down; the people of the towns of Israel, however, receive no such postponement of his judgement message. As far as Jesus himself is concerned, the news he brings is

judgement,

judgement,

judgement,

judgement,

judgement,

judgement,

and more judgement

every step of the way from the North of Israel, on his journey south towards Jerusalem. Until finally when we see him arriving at Jerusalem, what does he then preach to all his Israelite hearers? Sure enough, judgement.

This is only a selection of some from the central section of Luke's gospel (Luke 9:51-19:27). Many, equally harsh words are addressed to the religious insiders (for example here, here, here, and here, not to mention here.

Yet in agreeing that Jesus pressed home this message of judgement particularly amongst righteous religious hypocrites, we don't lose sight of the reality that Jesus' message for all the crowds he spoke to was exactly the same: You must repent, or face the wrath of God for all eternity. Jesus himself preached this. He required his disciples to preach accordingly.

Small wonder then, that the poor, the captives, the blind and the oppressed who heard this message of judgement flocked to Jesus, and found in him grace, peace, mercy, and the lifting of their burdens.

Unless we consider ourselves and our audience, for some bizarre reason, to be more righteous than the Israel that heard Jesus' preaching for themselves, then we ought to preach this same terrible judgement of God to our own burdened, depressed, weary and hopeless hearers. We ought to preach it with the full intensity and ferocity and tears that true love demands. As we do, we should pray that somehow they (and we) might not harden our hearts, but instead find mercy in and through the death and resurrection of Jesus.