Friday, August 9, 2019
The Lord, the Mighty One, is God, and he has spoken; he has summoned all humanity from where the sun rises to where it sets. From Mount Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines in glorious radiance. Our God approaches, and he is not silent. Fire devours everything in his way, and a great storm rages around him. He calls on the heavens above and earth below to witness the judgment of his people. “Bring my faithful people to me—those who made a covenant with me by giving sacrifices.” Then let the heavens proclaim his justice, for God himself will be the judge. Psalm 50:1-6
Everyone from a small child to an old man
understands (to varying degrees) the concept of right and wrong; we know there
is judgment, and that someone is in charge.
Scripture declares that Someone in charge
is the Lord.
Scripture also informs us that the God of
justice, overseeing judgment for wrong, prefers to extend mercy to those who
repent:
But you, O Lord, are a God of compassion and mercy, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love and faithfulness. Psalm 86:15
Compassion and mercy towards those
deserving judgment is the epic story of God’s desire to be in relationship with
all His creation. Our sin portends guilt
and judgment; God looms, and man cowers, repents, and is forgiven because of
God’s merciful nature; or we reject mercy and are condemned. It’s a formula as old as the universe, the
cosmic struggle between good and evil for the souls of humans.
Now, that formula, God’s lovingkindness
and forgiveness, which always follow repentance, is unchanged, as is the
refreshing of the cleansing work God does in our souls when He forgives and
restores us to His favor.
But there is a nuance of modern-day
unbelief that has put respectability in the culture for
those who choose to reject God’s offer of grace. What’s chic, or “in” is to hide the
traditional shaking the fist towards heaven in defiance, by
declaring God as inconsequential. Those
who choose to twist what Scripture says, in order to take judgment off the
table, do so thinking they take the sting of sin out of God’s
righteousness. That thinking is
something like: If there really is
a God, then he’s all love and everything is ok. The problem with that is, if everything’s ok,
how come this world is so messed up? You
cannot have it both ways; we are either sinners in need of a forgiving God who
tempers justice with mercy…or we are alone in the universe and bound to destroy
ourselves; evil is just too real to think otherwise!
It isn’t a wise idea to try to cast God
off to one side or another. Choosing to
not think about something does not make it disappear. That would be a kind of madness, especially
when it is eternity hanging in the balance.
C.S. Lewis once wrote “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and
if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is
moderately important.”[2]
For You Today
For anyone thinking to negate the judgment
of God it would be wise to first figure-out if there is such a thing as
judgment at all…as in whether your finger will burn if you stick it in the
fire.
Go to VIDEO
[1]
Title Image: Courtesy of Pixabay.com
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture used from The New Living Translation©
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture used from The New Living Translation©
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