Like entering your travel destination into Google Maps, verses 5 and 6 of Psalm 1 show the location at the end of life’s journey.

(10 min. reading time)

5They will be condemned at the time of judgment.
    Sinners will have no place among the godly.
6 For the Lord watches over the path of the godly,
    but the path of the wicked leads to destruction.

The previous two posts contrasted the righteous and wicked lives, “The righteous are rooted, nourished, and fruitful, but the wicked become dry, rootless, and worthless.” 1 Jesus repeated this idea when he described himself as the vine and believers as the branches (John 15:5-8). Intimacy with God is necessary for fruitfulness. Those who refuse connection with God are like the dead branches that will be thrown into the fire. Fire is a symbol used often in the Bible for judgment.

This post will focus on the concept of judgment as fair and required by a just God.

Jesus was not shy when it came to speaking about judgment. He provided numerous parables on the topic of the eventual separation of the righteous from the wicked. Consider the following judgment parables:

  • Parable of the wheat and the tares (Matt. 13:24-33)
  • Parable of the fishing net (Matt. 13:47-52)
  • Parable of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19-31)
  • Parable of the great wedding feast (Matt. 22:1-14)
  • Parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:31-46)

Jesus described judgment at the end of the age as “removing from his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil” (Matt. 13:41). He mirrored David’s words in saying that sinners will have no place among the righteous. Why is this separation necessary? When we see or experience injustice, we are acutely aware why this is necessary. We want perpetrators of injustice kept separate from the general population.

Injustice and wrath – David and nathan

King David’s response of outrage when Nathan the prophet tells him the story about the rich man taking the poor man’s only lamb resonates with us (2 Samuel 12:1-14). When David realized that he is the rich man in the story he turned from his sin and asked for forgiveness. He acknowledged his sin before a righteous God. Though David’s sin was forgiven, the child from his adulterous relationship with Bathsheba died.

David’s reaction to the rich man taking the poor man’s lamb and feeding it to his guest is one way many people view God’s response (wrath) to our sin – he burned with anger! When we think of human wrath, we envision someone on a warpath to get revenge. This person is scary. They have crossed the line from anger to rage and have completely lost control of themselves. If this is our image of wrath based on our human experience, then how do we picture the wrath of God?

While wrath is part of human nature, it is not part of God’s nature. The wrath of God is not irrational or reckless. God is fiercely opposed to the things that destroy his children.

God’s wrath is his just and planned response to sin.

No sin, no wrath. God established a principle with Adam in the Garden of Eden – if you eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will die. God’s wrath is his response in accordance with the principles he established and communicated to Adam.

Why is God so hard on sin? James Byran Smith answers the question this way, “God is against my sin because he is for me. And if I am for sin, God stands against those desires because they cause my destruction. Being soft on sin is not loving because sin destroys. I want a God who hates anything that hurts me.” 2

God’s wrath must be understood in the light of God’s love. It is because of God’s love for us that he stands against those things that will destroy us. People tend to begin with the idea that God is angry and wrathful. In fact, the opposite is true. God loves us and wants to protect us from evil. Jesus loved us so much that he drank the cup of God’s wrath (John 14:36) to restore the intimate relationship with God that sin had destroyed.

Returning to Nathan and David’s story, and David’s cry for justice, “one of the things we humans cannot escape is the longing for fairness and justice. We do not want a universe in which there is no justice, no right and wrong. And we do not want a God who is indifferent to moral evil.” 3

The caricature that people create in their minds based on David’s response to Nathan is an angry God with a lightning bolt in his hand ready to strike as soon as we step out of line. There is another caricature people have created of God in relation to judgment – a meek and mild gentle person. In this perspective God is indifferent to our sin. He is a “cosmic, benevolent spirit who never judges and does not punish sin. The cushy, fuzzy God.” 4 This caricature ignores judgment in favour of love because wrestling with the tension between love and wrath is challenging. Both caricatures are extremes that do not address the tension between God’s love and judgment.

Indifference to sin – David and absalom

The story of David and his third son Absalom extends over an eleven-year period and reads very much like a modern soap opera (2 Samuel 13-19). Here is the abbreviated version.

The story begins with Absalom’s beautiful sister Tamar and his half-brother Amnon. Amnon lusted after Tamar and through trickery had her come to his house, where he raped her and then sent her away in disgrace. Absalom took his sister in to live with him and after two years he came up with a plan to correct this injustice after their father David appeared to do nothing in response to the situation. Absalom invited Amnon to his house for a party, and during the festivities, Absalom had his servants kill Amnon. Absalom had avenged Tamar’s disgrace, and to him justice was served.

Afraid of the consequences of this murder, Absalom ran for his life to Geshur, where he stayed for three years. Although Scripture says that David “longed to go out to Absalom,” again David did not do anything. Instead, David’s general, Joab, brought Absalom back to Jerusalem, however, Absalom was not permitted to enter David’s presence. After two years of living this way, again through Joab’s intercession, David and Absalom met and experienced some form of reconciliation.

After this meeting, Absalom began to undermine David’s rule. He set himself up as judge in Jerusalem to influence people away from David. After four years of gathering people to himself through promises of what he would do if he were king, Absalom went to Hebron, where he had previously arranged to have himself proclaimed king.

The conspiracy was so strong that David began to fear for his life. He gathered his servants and fled Jerusalem leaving some behind including his adviser Hushai who acted as an informer for David. Upon entering Jerusalem as king, Absalom immediately took over David’s house. Initially Absalom planned to pursue and attack David’s forces, but Hushai advised him to delay his attack which allowed David to muster what troops he had and mount a counterattack to retake the kingdom.

David did not participate in the battle himself, but he ordered the generals to “deal gently” with Absalom. When Joab found Absalom horseless and suspended from a tree by his hair, Joab killed him then and there against David’s instructions and ended the rebellion. 5 Joab recognized that Absalom’s threat to the throne had to be permanently removed so that it would never happen again.

David’s indifference to the destructive activities within his own family is baffling. David does not protect or support Tamar, he does not confront Amnon’s disgraceful actions, and he looks the other way when Absalom kills his half-brother. Through his inaction David allowed sin to fester in the family which produced even more destructive behaviour. Instead of dealing with the sin he looked the other way, which invited sin back into the city, and he almost lost the kingdom.

David being soft on sin does not portray the image of a loving father because sin destroys, and a loving father would protect his children from destruction. People sometimes say, “If God loves the world, why can’t he just ignore sin?” But this misses the point.

“God deals with sin’s destructive power because he cares about people.” 6

God deals with sin because he loves the world.

renovation

In his book, The Skeletons in Gods Closet, Joshua Ryan Butler paints another picture of indifference to sin. 7 He talks about renovating a house in dire need of TLC. Think moldy walls, broken windows, and a cracked foundation. What would happen if the contractor you hired painted over the moldy walls, covered the broken windows with a plant or furniture, and ignored the cracked foundation. Eventually the mold would reappear through the paint; the wind and rain would not be contained by the plant or furniture; and the cracked foundation would crumble – bringing the home down on top of the family. The shabby contractor would have jeopardized the family’s safety. We would not recommend this contractor to anybody. In fact, we would say, if you see this contractor, turn around and run in the opposite direction!

“God’s love for the world gives rise to his judgment of the world. He wants to renovate our dilapidated home and make it new. We do not have the power to fix our world. But God does.

It is God’s love for the world – his extravagant, undeserved, gracious love – that redeems our home from the sin that is tearing it apart.” 8

Judgment points to the seriousness of sin and the injustice humans experience as a result. Sin destroys and kills. God loves his children and wants to protect them from sin and its consequences. The sin in our lives might not be as dramatic as David’s family legacy. We might not consider our sin as outright rebellion against God because it doesn’t look that way.

I like Brant Hansen’s definition of sin, “My sin isn’t sin because it’s on some random list of activities that God just doesn’t happen to like. It’s a shortcut that leads away from the kingdom of God, where I can flourish, to a different kingdom – the kingdom of me. There’s another word for the kingdom of me … it’s called hell.” 9

Up Next

From judgment to hell. Because God is love, hell – a place of separation from God – is necessary. What did Jesus say about hell?

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Notes

  1. NIV Grace and Truth Study Bible(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2021)
  2. James Bryan Smith, The Good and Beautiful God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 123.
  3. Smith, 121.
  4. Smith, 116.
  5. https://www.gotquestions.org/who-was-Absalom.html
  6. Joshua Ryan Butler, The Skeletons in God’s Closet (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2014), 118.
  7. Butler, 119.
  8. Butler, 118-119.
  9. Brant Hansen, The Men We Need (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 2022), 56.

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